My Alien Wife
by Chris Kenworthy
Summary: On Senior Year Spring Break, the 'I know an alien' club goes back to Las Vegas, and Tess takes Kyle out for a wild night out, ending up at a wedding chapel! But can Kyle keep his new wife by his side when she gets hit with the Divorce blues?
1. Chapter 1

"Yeah, Vegas baby!" I shouted out as we drove across the state line.

"We're not at Vegas yet, Valenti," Michael Guerin groused sourly at me.

"Yeah, but at least we're in Nevada now," I pointed out.

"He's got a point," Maria DeLuca said dryly. Michael shot her a frustrated look. "Come on, honey. This Vegas thing was your idea in the first place. Aren't you excited that it was such a hit we're doing it all over again?"

"Yeah, I guess so," Michael admitted after a moment. "Though I think I'd have appreciated a slightly smaller party... yet again." He glared at me as if suggesting that I, particularly, wasn't exactly welcome. I shrugged. I'd been invited along fairly both times, even if Michael didn't himself approve. "And I suppose I kind of miss going in style last time."

"Well, if you hadn't been so insistent on blowing the tainted money all at once last time, then maybe we'd have had a little left over for plane tickets and a nice hotel room. Or you could've got your rich sister to foot the bill. But no on both counts, so we're pretty much stuck with the usual spring break funds." Michael turned his glare back at me... he was getting pretty good at that, but I had some practice in shrugging it off by now.

"So, Kyle," Maria said brightly, obviously trying to change to a subject that wouldn't keep personally offending her steady squeeze so often. "How have things been going between you and Miss Tess Harding lately?"

"Umm... not too badly," I admitted, a little puzzled by the question. "Things are still tight for space chez Valenti, but I think I've been a little less grouchy since Dad was able to get the futon, and the weather's been nice enough that when I'm just sick and tired of waking up in the living room I can go and camp out in a tent in the back yard sometimes."

Maria stared back through the rear view mirror at me, (which Michael was probably going to adjust in a second, because it wasn't set up where he could actually use it to look behind the Jetta,) and shook her head, brownish-red curls flying everywhere. "No, I'm not talking about that. Things **between** you and Tess." The fact that stressing the word 'between' didn't help clarify things must have shown pretty obviously on my face.

"I'm talking about... well, I've seen the way she's been looking at you lately, Valenti. Are you telling me that you haven't noticed- okay, well, since you're a guy, I guess it's entirely possible that you could be clueless about something so obvious." Maria sighed. "She's crushing on you big-time, Kyle. Maybe even something that's deep enough that it can't be fairly called a 'crush.'"

I shook my head. "That's crazy. Whatever happened between Tess and I is long over." A stream of memories flashed through my mind... the way that she looked the first moment I saw her in her junior prom dress. Driving her home _after_ the junior prom, and kissing on the sofa. The two of us taking a picnic lunch out into Frazier woods, talking for hours, and making out again among the trees. A fancy, romantic dinner at that new Mexican restaurant on the west side of town. And - the look on Tess' face when I told her that I didn't think things were working out between us, parked in the driveway.

"Yeah, why did you dump her ass, anyway?" Michael asked. "Never really cared before, but I kinda got the vibe that you really liked her."

"I **did** really like her," I said, wondering if it would be fair to say that 'I do still.' But, whether or not that addition was true, it definitely wasn't something I would want to admit to these people. "That... was part of the problem. I... I liked her more than I thought she'd ever feel the same about me." That sentence was grammatically monstrous enough to make Mrs Lewis shriek and threaten to hold me back from graduation a year, but I didn't worry about it right now. "She was good at going through the motions, but deep down I was starting to see that she still held this huge flame for Evans... for Max, I mean. And - well, I guess deep down I just couldn't deal with the idea of playing second fiddle - of being the one that she was with because he didn't want her."

"Yeah..." Maria had an oddly pensive note in her voice... (I couldn't still see her, because Michael had indeed adjusted the mirror,) and definitely shot a momentary look over at him in the driver's seat. "I... I guess I can see how that would be hard... though maybe if you hadn't rejected her, it wouldn't have been that long before she forgot about Max and really fell in love with you."

"Ehh." I wasn't so sure about that. "The thing is... without any offence meant to Liz, and Max too I guess because he's made no secret about how much he wants her and won't settle for anyone else... but Tess really **deserves** to have true love with the guy she's been dreaming of. She's been through so much... lived her whole childhood with a creepy-ass alien killer operative as the only other person really in her life... struggled with her demons and blossomed as this incredibly caring, generous, sweet young lady in the best sense of the words..."

"Hey, Kyle!" I looked up at Maria. "What... what if I were to tell you that Tess has, over the past few weeks, found that she's been forgetting about Max Evans in a way that she never believed was really possible? What if she had a new stud-muffin of her dreams, and I was talking to him right now?"

"Well, I'm kind of spoken for," Michael interrupted.

"Quiet." And Maria slapped his shoulder, not too hard. "You may be able to hear what I'm saying, but I'm not talking **to** you. Got it?"

"To answer the question... I'd ask how you could possibly know this," I said suspiciously. "Tess isn't exactly in the habit of sharing that sort of thing with you." Though - I suppose it was just possible that Tess might have confided in Isabel, and Isabel might have told Liz and Maria...

"She told me, alright! Umm... we were - She was still at the Crashdown a few days ago when it was time for me to start closing, and we started talking."

"Hmm." That didn't seem like a terribly likely scenario. More likely, Maria was just trying to fix Tess and me up for her own reasons. On the other hand... well, hanging out with Tess didn't seem like that bad an idea... better than trying to be a third wheel to one of the real couples, and if something happened to start up and we messed around - well, there wasn't much harm in that, was there? It wasn't like she wasn't a phenomenally gorgeous and sexy girl in addition to all of that stuff about her character I was ranting about a while ago. Just the thought of her lips against mine, in a relatively simple and chaste kiss, made my heart beat fast and my skin flush hot.

"How do you figure the others are doing?" I asked. Nobody wanted to be too crowded on this road trip, so we were driving in three different cars... Max and Liz together in the Jeep, Tess with Alex and Isabel, and, well, obviously you can tell who I'd ended up hitching a ride with. It would probably have saved some gas money if we'd crammed into two cars, but - well, we didn't.

"Umm, I think Alex was ahead of me," Michael pointed out. "Max and Liz are probably twenty miles behind, or so. It's a bit hard to tell."

"Wouldn't surprise me if they pulled off to the shoulder of the road again," Maria replied with a soft giggle. After several seasons' worth of 'on-again and off-again,' Max and Liz were definitely on again now, and lost no chance for a public (or less than public, one would assume,) display of affection. I haven't really been keeping close enough track to tell what the last breakup and reconciliation was about... frankly, I never pay that much attention to them, so sorry if you really want to know. Tough tootie.

"Oh, hey, Las Vegas city limits in three miles!" Maria exclaimed, seeing a sign. "I didn't realize we were that close when we crossed the state line."

"Yeah, Vegas is pretty close to where Nevada, Arizona, and California all come together..." Michael told her.

#

It didn't take long for us to find our hotel. As Michael had hinted, Isabel's party had arrived first and checked in. It wasn't a fancy casino hotel on the strip, but wasn't quite a fleabag motel either, just a fairly plain and clean Ho-jos with plenty of parking around. It had been agreed beforehand that I'd share a room with Alex, which was fine by me - he's a pretty cool guy, though I realized that he'd probably want to spend a lot of time with Isabel. And Isabel's roommate, of course - was Tess. Yet another little thing that seemed to be pushing us both together for this trip, though there wasn't really any other way to arrange it to avoid that it seemed. Max/Michael and Liz/Maria were both rooming together as well, so that they could just switch rooms, either way, and be together as couples. (Well, not with Max and Liz switching, so that Liz ended up with Michael and Max with Maria, obviously. But Max and Liz could be in either the guys' room or the girl's room, and Michael/Maria would be in the other.)

I stepped into the door of Isabel's room and watched quietly as Tess unpacked some of her stuff into the dresser, not saying anything, just looking and wondering about what Maria had said. If she was right, if Tess **was** feeling the love for me without exception or reservation, if she'd left the stubborn obsession with Max behind, then what about me? Did I still have feelings for Tess like I did last year around this time? I'd been treating her as a sister... at first because it was the easiest way of dealing with sharing space with her after the breakup, and then it had become a force of habit. Did I still have the kind of passion that you really shouldn't have for a blood sister, waiting underneath those surface behaviour patterns?

Last year around this time...

Another vivid memory flash hit me. I know an alien club's first Vegas trip, April of 2001. The formal banquet that Maria had arranged on the last night. When Michael had called Maria up to the stage to sing, Tess had pulled me off to the dance floor. I remember every detail so clearly: the way the temporarily straight locks of blonde hair framed her face, the pink and purple print gown that she wore and how it seemed to flow around her curves as she walked. The slight trace of a spicy perfume that I could only catch a good whiff of when I held her close in my arms...

"Kyle?" The soft voice saying my name dragged me out of reverie, and I realized that Tess had noticed me, and was staring in a vaguely curious fashion. "Is something wrong?"

Something melted my heart at that instant. Yeah, there was no way I could lie to myself about that. Tess could still make my heart thump as much as ever. "Umm, no, nothing is wrong. Just wondering what you want to do first."

Tess cocked her head pensively at me for a second, then stood up and stretched, which nearly made me groan out loud - the way the different parts of her body moved and took turns emphasizing themselves in that simple gesture took my breath away. She was wearing a silky long-sleeved blouse, coloured a light green, and a darker green skirt that was made out of some fabric that was a bit stretchy and more shiny, stretching down nearly to her knees. May not sound like the kind of outfit that can drive a teenage boy especially mad with lust, but I would counter with two points. One, have you _seen_ Tess? (Actually, I guess you very probably have.) This is the only girl I've ever seen who can literally take your breath away in her baggiest sweats... or at least she does that to me. Secondly, there was the tightness factor. Both of the major items in this outfit, though not revealing notable amounts of skin, (well, some calf-and-knee skin, which is nothing to sneeze at, but no longer considered particularly risqué or anything.) Um, well anyway, the blouse was just taut enough around her torso to deliciously emphasize her chest... aw, what the heck, I'll say it straight out. It showed off her rack, heheh. And similarly, the skirt clung to thighs and hips and all kinds of other luscious stuff, leaving few doubts about the shape of what was underneath.

Her hair was styled today in a couple of long, soft waves that fell past her shoulders, and little crystals exactly the same shade as her eyes shone from the tips of her ears. "Umm, well, I was hoping to spend a bit of time at the tables... see if this fake ID works any better than the corny one that Guerin gave me last time."

I smiled at that. Yeah, last time when Michael had turned all of our driver's licenses to make us all 21, he'd also put corny in-joke names on them... I'd been Harvey Wallbanger and Tess was Pina Colada. Of course, it was hard to say if the cheeky names had anything to do with the fact that Liz and Tess hadn't been able to get past the casino guards and been stuck together in the kids' arcade. That was maybe the first time that the two of them, rivals for Max's heart, had been thrown together without any of the rest around to keep the peace, but apparently nothing very dramatic happened either in terms of a catfight or with the two of them opening up and coming to terms.

This time, however we'd all taken more care with the fake IDs, and decided that since nobody in Las Vegas knew us by our real names, there was no reason that our fakes had to have fake names on them.

"Cool," I said. "What's your game? Blackjack? Craps? Don't tell me you want to play the damn slots. Tess, they're the worst sucker deal in the whole casino. For every dollar you put into a slot machine, seventy cents goes straight to the owner. All the payoffs are covered by the other thirty."

"Yeah, but the usual probabilities don't have to apply to me," Tess replied, stepping close to the door - close to me - and smiling sweetly. "I can get those thirty cents from a hundred other suckers, so what do I care how much the house keeps? Anyway, I don't want to start with the slots anyway. I thought I'd try my luck with the big wheel - roulette!"

"Alright," I said, smiling, and finding out that I enjoyed being so close to Tess. I could smell her perfume again - something kind of flowery and vaguely sweet. "Well, still, don't go nuts. You don't have much mad money to lose."

She stepped closer to me again. "Who said anything about losing?"

"Umm, yeah, sorry, I keep forgetting," I admitted. Most people, even professional cheats, who think that they can win at the casino every time they need to are seriously deluded. I'm not so sure about alien hybrids. "Just... do me a favour. If the pit boss tells you to leave the casino, then just go quietly, and don't start a fight whatever you do."

For a second Tess seemed confused by this remark. Then: "Oh, yeah... Michael got Max thrown in jail last time. Well, you won't have that problem if you stick with me, junior. I don' want no trouble," she drawled.

Actually I had been more worried about Tess herself getting thrown into jail... hadn't quite thought of me paying the price for her acting out. But I certainly wasn't about to leave her anytime soon if she wanted to stick close to me.

"Okay, which casino do you want to try first?"

Tess looked down from my face for a moment, looking surprised. "Whichever we can get to first - they're all the same to me baby. But aren't you going to change before we go?"

I looked down at my clothes... just casual stuff for travelling in really, bleached jeans with a few carefully ripped tears in them, and a loose baggy t-shirt. Nothing wrong with them, but I didn't see the harm in dressing up for gambling a little. Taking a nice hot shower would be good too. "Sure. See you in a few."

#

"Eighteen, red eighteen a winner."

I smiled and collected the take. After a little careful experimenting, Tess and I had sort of settled on a two-person system at the roulette wheel. It apparently took a lot of focused concentration for her to control the little roulette ball with any accuracy, and if she did that, and placed big bets and collected her own winnings, it would look more than a little suspicious. So I was placing big bets, and Tess was spotting them and making sure that I won... in fact, she was doing all too well at that. I had a pile of casino chips in my carry bucket that represented a slightly staggering amount of money, and the put boss was starting to look a little suspiciously at me.

Okay, so what would be least suspicious at this point? Just walk away from the table? No, that didn't quite seem like the thing to do. How about betting a large bet, twice or three times what I'd bet last time, (which was still only a small fraction of what I'd _won_,) and losing. But... but for that plan to work, I'd need to be able to signal to Tess that she shouldn't bias the throw... or in fact, to be safe, that she should bias it away from whatever I was betting on. And we hadn't done much with signals; because anything that the people with the security cameras could spot would just about _scream_ that we were collaborating somehow, and probably cheating. Hmm...

Well, with a bit of daring and a 'less is more' approach, I put my money down on the 'first twelve' spot, and then looked up to catch Tess' eyes with my own. Such a little thing, making eye contact with another person - something that was happening probably to hundreds of other people in the casino at this moment, but since we'd been avoiding looking at each other, it was hopefully a signal that was hard to miss. Now, the meaning of the signal might be harder for Tess to guess offhand, but since she'd have played such a big bet to win if I **hadn't** signalled her, hopefully the opposite made sense as a signal. She nodded, just slightly, a motion that probably nobody else would have even noticed, and we both watched the wheel as it started to spin. The ball danced around and around and gradually came to slow down around one sector of the wheel. It bounced past red twelve, and then red three, coming to a short stretch that was entirely free of 'first twelve' spots... was it about to reverse and head for red three? No.

"Zero!" A lot of people groaned, because the zero and the double-zero spot pretty much that nobody wins if they didn't specifically bet on those spots, or a few other special bets. I watched my own chips disappear without any particular remorse, of course, and an odd, familiar voice seemed to come from just behind my shoulder.

"Darnit, I didn't mean to do that to them."

I turned around, startled, but nobody was there. Startled for another reason, because the voice had definitely been Tess', and she was nowhere near close enough to speak so casually. If she had spoken loudly enough for me to hear her over the background noise, a lot of other people should be turning to look at her, and they weren't. And then it hit me. Tess could use her powers to make people see things or hear things that weren't completely real. That meant that she could make me hear her, and me alone, even when she wasn't close enough to me. It was a perfect way for her to send messages to me under the radar of casino security... as long as I didn't freak out like I nearly just did. And - was there some way for her powers to pick up secret messages from me in any similar way?

Well, I didn't want to hang around here any longer. We had more than enough money in my bucket to go out for a really fancy dinner together... assuming that she'd like to. I headed away from the roulette tables without catching Tess' eye, hoping that she would follow and not try to keep playing that table alone. As I was cashing out most of my chips, I caught sight of that wavy blond hair and her shades of green outfit, sitting at a slot machine briefly. About a minute after I walked out the front doors, she followed.

"Come on, what's the deal?" she asked. "You don't want to play any more?" And this was accompanied by the killer pout, the one that only Tess seem to know how to make, which always melts my knees into jelly.

"Umm, err..." I mumbled, my composure rattled for a moment. "Not - not right now. We can go back to the tables in a bit. Right now I'm hungry. How do you feel about dinner?" I showed her the wad of bills that I'd gotten from the bucket of chips, and ran my thumb along the edge to flash each denomination for a fraction of second like an animation flip book. "Someplace fancy."

Tess grinned at the thought. "I think I know just the place."

She led me carefully across the street, along the sidewalk through the busy crowds for about a block and a half, into a magnificently tall building, and up the express elevator to the very top, where a maitre'D in a goddamn tuxedo told her that without a reservation, we'd be waiting for over half an hour, but probably not more than forty minutes, for a table two to open up. Tess turned to me. "What do you think?"

"Well, as much as I generally hate to eat somewhere that the staff dresses so much nicer than me," I said, loud enough for tuxedo boy to hear, "this seems good, and I don't particularly mind the wait I guess. Is there a bar where we can hang out until our name comes up?"

The maitre looked at me a little severely. "There is indeed. Do you by chance have proof of majority?"

"Come on," Tess insisted. I think that she was worried about someone once again seeing through her fake ID. "We don't have to drink booze; we're just looking for someplace to hang out until we can have dinner."

"Actually, I wouldn't mind a beer," I put in. "And yes, I've got my ID." He put out his hand, and I shrugged, took out my fake, and gave it to him. He peered at it for a second, and then nodded slightly.

"And the lady? You don't have to show it to me, but..." He didn't finish the sentence. Tess sighed, dug into her purse, and handed him the little plastic sleeve. "Thank you, Miss Harding. The bar entrance is through there." He pointed back at an angle, close to the door that we'd come in through from the elevator lobby. The bar was dark, crowded, and pretty full of cigarette smoke. We managed to nab two seats at the bar before anyone else could, and I had my beer while Tess ordered a mineral water.

"Are we having fun yet?" I said, partly because it was the only thing I could think of to say that didn't seem entirely out of place somewhere so crowded.

"More than you'd think!" Tess replied, and in a motion that seemed utterly casual, and yet had an electrifying effect on both my body and mind, she dropped her left hand to rest it on the outside of my right leg, maybe one third of the way up-thigh from my knee. She smiled dazzlingly straight into my eyes.

"Umm..." Should I respond to this directly? Asking what she meant by it seemed entirely the wrong tack to take. I decided to serve it back about as subtly as she had sent it out. "Glad to hear it!" And I wrapped my arm around her shoulders in a gesture that could have been just friendly, or more. There was a twinkle in her eyes as I touched her, I'm sure that there was. And then I lifted up my bottle of beer and somebody bumped into me from behind, and I had to let go of her and grab at the bar to keep myself from falling half off the stool.

I'm not sure what we talked about for most of the time that we waited in the bar... it doesn't really seem like it was even fifteen minutes, let alone more than half an hour. I do remember doing a Michael impersonation for her, (being careful not to mention anything too alien-sensitive,) which got her started doing riffs off Maria and Isabel. We stayed off Max and Liz by some sort of unspoken understanding, realizing that there was a loaded topic hidden there. I wanted to talk about graduation and where we'd be going for university afterwards... but it didn't seem smart, considering that I was sitting drinking a beer in a fancy bar with a fake ID, to advertise the fact that we were both still in high school.

Eventually Tess' name was called and the maitre'D led us to our table... which was a great one, right next to the window so that we could look out and see the lights of the city fading into the desert night, headlights on the highway and everything else there was to be seen, which wasn't much. The actual restaurant was much less crowded than the bar, only a few other tables about and separated with those wood dividers that are actually pretty good at muffling sounds. So, after pondering the menu for a little bit, I lowered my voice and asked the question that I'd been wondering about. "Is... is there any way for you to use your powers to detect something that casino security couldn't? Some signal that I'm trying to send to you?"

She blinked and thought about it. "Well, let's think about that," she whispered back, and her soft voice somehow sent a thrill up my spine even though what we were talking about was completely practical. "I could probably detect something that was going on underneath your clothes if I tried... like if you were pointing out a certain number of fingers in your pocket. But someone with a good security camera would probably be able to tell that something odd was going on there, even if he or she might not be able to see the exact message you were sending." I nodded, wondering what else Tess might have tried to detect underneath my clothes. I mean, heck, if I had a power like that... but if I thought about that for too long, something might happen under my clothes that you wouldn't need alien powers to detect.

"What's most private from the security cameras is your own mind, of course... but I've never really tried to read people's thoughts, even the surface layers. Isabel can do a very little bit of that... actually working with deeper layers, extrapolating from her dream-walking powers." I nodded. "Even with that, it'd be hard for you to send a deliberate message that she can pick up, simply because you're not generally aware of your subconscious mind. I can be aware of your mind when I try to mind-warp you... I have to, in order to know where I'm sending stuff, but I don't get a great deal information about your thoughts, just the fact that there's a conscious mind inside your noggin. Oh, and sometimes, I suppose I can tell what's already in the sensory regions of the brain I'm working with - what they're seeing, and hearing, and so on, so I know what I need to..."

The waiter came up at that point, and we ordered drinks and said that we needed a bit longer to decide, and actually made up our minds once the waiter had left. I couldn't resist the lure of a fantastically expensive sirloin steak with garlic mashed potatoes and garden vegetables, and Tess settled on fettuccine rosé with spicy grilled chicken strips. Then she turned back to me and grinned. "Try to feel an emotion without showing it visibly."

"Umm, okay." I paused for a moment, and without deliberately selecting it, let all the passion and lust that I'd ever felt for Tess well up inside me. Lust is an emotion, right? She stared at me, and then blushed slightly. "Desire... love, right?"

"Pretty much, yeah," I admitted. "Was using different words - passion and lust, but they amount to pretty much the same thing, yeah?" Tess nodded. "How did you tell?"

"Emotional reactions are chemical," she pointed out. "Chemicals in the brain, in the blood stream. It's all just molecules in particular shapes. And - and I guess I can sense those molecules, if I try hard enough."

My jaw dropped open and I stared. "All right, are you ready to order now?" I was stunned speechless enough that Tess, still blushing, ordered the main dishes for both of us; though I was able to recover in enough time to say that I'd like a glass of white wine with my dinner. If... if her powers had grown so much, that she could detect molecules so deep inside of me - was there anything that could possibly be hidden from that sort of power? Alright, people's minds are more complicated than molecules; I could see how that was possible. Or were they? Just what was the soul, and was it made up of anything? Energy, yeah, and possibly just patterns of matter that were unbelievably complicated in their extent...

Turning away from that subject, I turned to something else that had been nagging at me. "You... you've been flirting with me ever since I showed up at the hotel," I noticed out loud.

"Well... duh, yes," she admitted. "I think that comment actually qualifies you for a position as one of the truly great masters of the obvious."

I ignored the gentle tease, except for smiling slightly at it. "Any chance that, on that cliché and hackneyed scale from one to ten, or zero to ten whatever, that you'd be willing to indicate how serious you are about it, or do I have to figure that out the old fashioned way?"

"Hmm." Tess pondered that question weightily. "Well... I don't have anything in particular against telling you, but then again, making you find out another way sounds fun too." She giggled sexily. "Maybe you need to figure out 'a way of making me talk'?"

Oh, man, she was so gorgeous when she smiled like that. If we were sitting next to each other, I'd try to kiss her, but this was a tiny booth, the two of us facing each other, and there just didn't seem to be any way of doing that without climbing out, which somehow seemed like it was being way too obvious. But I reached out to take her hand in mine, stroking her first finger with my thumb softly in that way that I remembered figuring out she liked, on that picnic hike we took. She smiled, but shook her head slightly.

Okay, patience, grasshopper. If you want to keep your cool, then you're going to have to relax and let this play out a bit more slowly. Maybe as soon as we finished dinner and stood up, I could stand close and give her an opportunity to kiss me, see if she took it. If she didn't - I'd have to decide if I wanted to try making the first move and kissing her myself. We started talking softly about other stuff, about a few shows that she was interested in going to see, about the strategy in blackjack and the odds in craps, (mostly me talking about those, though she seemed quite interested to listen, if not to actually join in and make it a conversation.) And she brought up, with a certain deliberateness I think, how she'd been eating alone in the Crashdown last week and saw Max and Liz heading out for a date, and thought about me. Was that a subtle signal? A confirmation that she wanted me and not Evans? It was hard to say, from the way that she talked about it, but the general tone was encouraging at least.

Our food arrived, and it was delicious, and we didn't talk about much, except that she puppy-dog-eyed me into letting her have a little bit of my steak, and that got us chatting for a few minutes about barbecuing... a few cookouts that we'd had in the backyard last summer, and Tess saying that we should do it again this summer. Once most of my plate was clean, I softly reminded her that we'd probably both be spending a lot of the summer getting ready for college, though that wouldn't take enough time that a little grilling was impossible.

"It had better not." She sighed. "I feel so bummed about the notion that it looks like we're not going to be going to the same place." Right... if Tess was suddenly embracing feelings for me, I could understand how that would be a sore point. Dad and I been so excited about me getting a letter of acceptance and athletic scholarship at USC that we'd sent back a confirmation, and the small required deposit, right away. But Tess hadn't been accepted at the one place that she'd applied to in the Los Angeles area. I didn't know what to say about that.

Tess started talking about her college choices... she hadn't made up her mind yet, and had acceptance letters from schools in Albuquerque, Dallas, Arizona, Salt Lake City, and Oklahoma on her short list. I'd forgotten about my plans by the time we finished dessert, (chocolate sundae and a slice of chocolate cake with Tabasco drizzled on it - you should be able to figure out who had what,) paid the bill in cash, and stood up - but that didn't matter. Tess stepped close to me and her lips touched mine with an electrical rush. "So, whatcha want to do now, sweet thing?" she whispered softly. "Back to the tables somewhere? Take in a show?"

I grinned... the kiss had been amazing, through brief and simple, and it was becoming pretty clear that Tess was definitely wanting to mess around at some point on our trip. I loved the idea, of course. But I wasn't quite about to be the first one to suggest we find someplace that we could have privacy. "Yeah, I've had enough of the casinos for now I think. Let's see what there is here for shows." We took the elevator back down to the ground floor, and wandered through the front lobby, which had posters for all of our options.

"Hmm... the tallest, limberest dancing girls in Nevada?" I read. Tess shook her head immediately and dragged me away from that sign.

"Carrot top?" she hazarded.

"Eww... no no _no_!" I couldn't help sticking out my tongue for a moment out of sheer disgust. "Sorry, but I cannot _stand_ him."

We couldn't agree on any of the music headliners either, so settled on something that neither of us knew what to expect from enough to complain - a kind of music and comedy variety thing. I enjoyed it. There was some pretty funny improv stuff, and a sketch series that seemed like a sitcom that never made it onto TV - the staff of a small wedding chapel and the wacky shenanigans they get into bailing each other out of gambling problems and dealing with the relationship problems of would-be clients. Most of the songs seemed to actually mention Vegas in the title - What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, and a kind of sweet tune about going to Vegas to take the plunge and get married. (Maybe I liked it because the girl singing was cute - a tall brunette with long curly hair and pale, creamy skin, But anyway.)

It was getting pretty late by the time we got out of that show, but Tess was a dynamo of energy, leading me to the roulette tables in this casino. And no matter how many emotions I **sent** to her, she wouldn't let up, her disembodied voice insisting that I place more and larger bets. We got the velvet glove out of that casino after winning about three thousand dollars, and Tess just went right over to the one next to the casino we started in. Before she went in I managed to pull her back long enough to talk for a moment. "Why... why is it important that we win so much?"

She smiled. "Well... it's kind of a surprise." She weighed the question back and forth, and then her willpower lost. "I... I want to get us our own room, here in one of these fancy places right on the strip."

I thought about that, and grinned. "Sounds great... better than having to room with Alex, even if that was just theoretically. We'll have to go back there to get some things, though."

"Yeah. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Come on!"

I put my first big bet down on number seven. May the seventh - Tess' birthday, at least on her fake birth certificate. According to that, she'd be nineteen in just a few months.

#

"Alright," Tess said, once we'd put our bags in the new hotel room at New York-New York. We'd slipped back into the old hotel separately, but Tess, going first, said that nobody had seen her. Of course, when I heard that, I realized it meant that Alex had Isabel over in my room, and I knew that that could be awkward. Fortunately, they weren't really doing stuff, just sitting up, talking, and drinking some kind of fancy bottle juice with hotel machine ice. I said that I just needed my bag and I'd be out of their hair, and Alex nodded. Presumably he thought that I'd be staying in Tess room here in the same hotel with everybody else, but I really liked her idea better.

"Yeah, it's just great," I said, and wrapped my arms around her. She was eager, and yet far from compliant... she wanted this, but definitely had her own notions about how this was going to play out. For a little while, at least, our brains were going down parallel tracks - deep, passionate kisses, drinking thirstily from between each other's passionate lips... a little cliché necking and wandering hands. When I tried to unfasten the buttons of her blouse, though, she pulled away slightly, and smiled at me teasingly.

"I... I still feel so hyper," she admitted. "I want to do something a bit different than just making out with you here. Is - is that okay?"

"Umm... I don't know," I admitted. "Depends on what you've got in mind."

"Want to go take a swim?" she sing-songed. "There's an indoor pool in the hotel. Sounds like fun to me."

"Hmm... That has possibilities." I admitted. "Umm... what kind of a bathing suit did you bring?"

Tess laughed loudly. "Ohh... now why would you possibly be curious about that? Wondering, maybe, if it's a revealing outfit?" I did a half-shrug and half-nod... I had seen Tess Harding wearing a bikini swimsuit exactly once, near the end of last summer, after we'd already broken up, and only the briefest of glimpses... but it was quite an incredible sight. She flounced off to one of her suitcases, rummaged through it a bit, and emerged with two little bits of flimsy white cloth. "Hmm, I guess these probably count as revealing, wouldn't you?"

I literally couldn't speak for several seconds. Not just that what she had shown me was skimpy - though it was, but also: white. Did **all** white stuff get transparent when it was wet, or only certain things? Would Tess have tested a swimsuit for something like that before packing it? And if she hadn't... did I really want to let her wear something that was potentially _that_ exposive to a pool that was at least semi-public? Both from the perspective of 'did I want to let her do something that she would probably find embarrassing,' and 'did I want to take the chance of someone _else_ seeing her that way?'

Suddenly Tess burst out laughing. "Ohh, the look on your face Kyle - I would _love_ to know what you were thinking! This isn't actually made for wearing into the water. Though you may get to see me wearing it a bit later, if you play your cards right." Suddenly I realized that it was some kind of lingerie. "Here's the real swimsuit." The bundle of fabric that she tossed into my arms was scarcely any bigger, but a vibrant red in color. I held up the triangle-style top, trying to picture how it would look on Tess... I don't generally think of her as a lady in red, but couldn't argue with the mental picture.

"Okay, if the lady wants to go swimming, we go swimming," I agreed. Was there any kind of a doubt?

There were only two other people in the entire pool room, (and it was a _big_ pool, maybe forty yards long, so just shy of Olympic length, and fifteen wide.) They were another couple, and were obviously determined to pretend that they didn't notice us, hoping that we'd extend the same courtesy. So Tess and I slipped into the very shallow end, dunked our heads under, and started to playfully wrestle around, loosening up and getting comfortable with each other. Tess looked just as hot and sexy in the red string bikini as I could ever have dreamed or hoped, and she seemed to like the way I was filling out my black boxer trunks, and the way the rest of me just filled out by itself without any kind of concealment at all. I've been doing my best to stay in shape, though I'm not playing as many organized sports as I did back in sophomore year... of course, football team is nothing to sneer at, but it doesn't really keep you in shape well from just playing football. (That's why football players have to exercise in other ways just to get themselves ready to play.)

Just when I was winning with the rassling, of course, Tess started to kiss me again. Maybe I was expecting that to happen - couldn't say why else I was rassling so hard. (It was a nice reward for victory, if you want to look at it that way.) She looked very different just from getting her hair wet, as girls with curly or wavy hair usually do - the water straightens everything as it drenches, making the strands stick to each other and cling to skin. She looked a lot more natural that way, less... less carefully arranged and made up just so, (which probably had to do with it too; I don't think she'd worn waterproof makeup today,) but certainly not less lovely. When the kiss broke, she lay back on the water, letting herself float, and I let my fingers run softly along the back of her left thigh. "I... I think I'm falling in love with you all over again," I blurted out. I hadn't realized that before I heard the words, and yet there was an undeniable truth in them. "Are... are you, do you..."

"I - I never stopped loving you, Kyle," Tess admitted. "For so long, I was silently torn between two loves... or two desires at least - not going to get into whether what I felt for... for **him** was really love, an obsession, an infatuation..." She sighed. "Part of me is ready to move on, Kyle... Max isn't holding me back any more, I'm certain of that." She sighed. "But... but I'm not sure how much I want to get my hopes up for a relationship that has only so long before we go off to school in different states."

"We could try to make it work long distance," I said, letting my fingers move up and softly stroke the skin of her back - without much enthusiasm. The words I said, I mean - I was quite enthusiastic about the stroking.

"Yeah, but... that's hard enough even for people who've had a year or longer together to work things out and get themselves into a good place to spend that much time away from each other," Tess pointed out. "We'd probably just be coming _out_ of the honeymoon phase when we get separated, if we get together now, and that seems like a recipe for disaster. You're going to be running into a lot of cute, California beach bunny cheerleaders at the post-game parties or whatever, and I'll probably have guys hitting on me too, and - and I'm not sure how good either of us would be at withstanding temptation with the other person not being close enough to see every day."

Hmm - I wasn't sure I agreed about that... I'm a stand-up guy; don't think I'm easily led astray by a pretty face... or a sweet pair of tits or whatever. And Tess is pretty true and loyal herself. (Tess Trueheart... wasn't she Dick Tracy's girlfriend?) But things were _still_ likely to get strained in a situation like that, even if there was no actual cheating happening. That much made sense. Except... "You really think that our honeymoon phase would last five or six months?"

She smiled. "I'm... I'm not sure, that just kind of came out." She stood up again. "Maybe - maybe we should just enjoy this vacation for what it is, and not worry about long-term commitment until afterwards? Assuming that it would even be a question then."

I thought about that. My reactions seemed to be swerving back and forth like a drunk driver weaving all over the road. I'd thought that I could just 'mess around' with Tess and keep thing casual, when she kissed be at the restaurant... but I hadn't reckoned on my heart. Still... it might hurt to really fall in love with Tess and not have things work out, but I'd been through that once already (I think) and survived. Maybe letting our impulses lead the way would bring us to an answer that our heads wouldn't be able to figure out beforehand. "Alright, I'm up for it." I leaned in, kissed her, and then poked her soft and squeezable ass, making her shriek into my mouth and around my lips.

"Oops," I admitted after a moment. "I shouldn't have done that." Then I pointed over to the deep end, where the other couple were apparently chasing each other or something. Hopefully we hadn't disturbed them much. "How about this?" And I kissed her again, my tongue working its way past her full, supple lips... and my fingers tried to work their way under the small patch of red fabric covering the fullest tip of her breast. However, the straps and the suit top in general was tighter than I expected, and instead of slipping underneath, what I managed to do was push both triangles up so that they were resting on the upper slopes of her breasts. She looked down, (even though she couldn't actually see much in mid-kiss,) and both of us started laughing helplessly.

#

We stayed up late that night talking, and slept late. There was more kissing and fooling around once we got back to the hotel room, but nothing particularly sexy - which means that nobody really got their rocks off courtesy of the other. (Not that I didn't try.) Since there were two beds in the room, we slept separately that night, showered together when we woke up, and went to a late lunch buffet for breakfast. Tess got me into a poker game for relatively small stakes... she wanted to figure out if she could mind-warp someone into thinking that they had a worthless card, or a better card. It was around this point that I realized there was a more useful aspect to her mind-warp talent than she'd realized... if she could just _tell_ what cards the other players were seeing, then she knew what everybody else at the table was holding. She was giving me some running commentary on this, in fact, without seeming to realize that it was an edge that just about any draw poker player would kill for.

I was wondering if the other couples would be upset that we'd run off, that we hadn't checked in or anything... but nobody had laid out ground rules for that sort of thing, and for all we knew, maybe Michael and Maria or Liz and Max had snuck off and gotten their own room too. Okay, probably not Liz and Max, I don't think that Liz would jump too impulsively on something like that, but she's surprised me about things like that before. After the poker we spent a little time at one of the craps tables, and here Tess didn't really need to use me to plant false bets, it turned out. She could make her own bets and try to bias the dice while someone else was shooting... and was doing okay at that. Tess seemed to take a perverse pleasure in fixing things so that the poor sap who was throwing the dice lost as often as possible. Once I dragged her away from the craps table, we got a few beverages, (she had a sprite and I had a coke, both ridiculously expensive and in tiny little glasses that probably didn't even hold an measured cup of soda. And then Tess talked me into going to listen to this R&B singer, a big, dark-skinned guy with a remarkably deep (and yet tuneful) voice.

After the fourth song, Tess picked up her glass, took a swallow, and then an odd expression crossed her face. (I was looking at her at the time it happened, for no particular reason other than that I was enjoying looking at her.) "Huh. Tastes kinda... funny... ohhh."

"What... what is it?"

"I - I don't think this was my ddringk." With a flash I realized that this was true - Tess' own glass, slightly less full than the one she held in her hand, was sitting in the cup holder in front of her and to her right - between her seat and mine. Mine was to my right. She must have picked up a glass from the cup holder to her left... I think that a thirty-something or fortyish woman had been there and then wandered off. And she left her drink, which I took out of her hands and sniffed carefully. This looked identical to her sprite, but wasn't quite the same... sprite and vodka? Or maybe a white rum?

Exactly what the spirit was didn't really matter. The point was... it was alcohol, probably a bit less alcohol than Max had taken out of my flask the night of the Blind date valentine contest... but that had been enough to get Max acting extremely out of character, almost blab his secret to his worst rival, (who was, at the time, yours truly,) and use his powers with hardly any care for being caught. About the only thing that saved him from disaster was that he'd spent most of the night in fairly isolated streets and balconies.

I was stuck with Tess in the heart of the busiest, wildest, most crowded tourist destination in the entire country. And another thing flashed through my mind... Max had gotten very affectionate, from what Liz told me about the part of that evening he was with her.

What was I in for?


	2. Chapter 2

I stared dully at the glass in my hand, trying to think, trying to come up with a plan. Tess had just picked up somebody else's drink, something with booze in it, and drank a bit, and she was starting to act... like she was getting hit hard by it. Just like Max had been when I 'encouraged' him to take a drink out of my flask, more than two years ago. It _must_ be a half-alien thing. (Or something that's twice as bad with full aliens maybe.) We were in a Vegas hotel/casino, sitting about halfway back in a medium-sized auditorium listening to a twentyish black guy singing the blues.

Even the first step in a plan would be good. This was a bad situation... above all, I had to keep Tess from attracting too much attention, or letting anyone suspect that she was... was not of this world. Probably she wouldn't care too much about that, so that I'd have to care enough to make up for a lack of inhibition on her part. We... we needed to get out of our seats and out of the room. But without being too noticeable about that.

"Hey, that was nice!" Tess protested, reaching out towards the glass. Suddenly, step one of the plan popped into my head, blindingly obvious. Step one was to keep Tess from drinking any more than she already had. So I went with my first instincts... I drained the entire glass myself in one fairly long swallow. "Hey, no fair!"

I looked into her face, which was probably a mistake. Tess was somehow managing to do everything possible with her expression that would make me weak... the seductive, deadly pout of course, one and a half bedroom eyes and half a puppydog eye, (or something like that, adding up to two eyes anyway,) and at the same time she was managing to do something very cute with that little nose of hers... like half a wrinkle and half a wiggle.

"Hey, what about _your_ drink, Kyle!" For a second I panicked, and then managed to remember that I hadn't been drinking anything hard right now, any more than Tess had been meaning to. She reached out, (giving me a good look down the scoop neck of the white top that she was wearing today... lord have mercy, what would it be like if she thought of aiming that cleavage at me on purpose?) completely ignoring the real glass of sprite, and took what was left of my coke out of the beverage holder on the other side of me. At the furthest extension of her leaning movement, the soft perkiness of her chest was brushing against my left thigh through several layers of clothing, and I inhaled automatically with the sensation.

Having retrieved my glass, she straightened up again, bringing it to her nose and inhaling in a way that I somehow found oddly sensual. "Nothing but cola," she announced in a breathy disappointed voice. "Who'd a thunk it?" Then her face brightened. "But I can get more sprite and whatever... we've got our fake IDs, right? It shouldn't be hard finding a damn bar in a Vegas hotel!"

Oh, boy. Even step one was going to be harder than it seemed. However, since she wanted to leave the auditorium now, and I wanted both of us out of the auditorium without anybody making a scene, it seemed (vaguely) best to go along for now. I would have to keep her away from the bars at some point. So we hurried out to the back exit, and into the hallway, which was nearly empty. Acting on pure instinct, (and possibly the white rum already hitting my system,) I took the lovely alien girl in my arms and kissed her. "Come on. You don't need anything more to drink, do you? How about we go back up to the room together?"

Tess smiled teasingly. "Ohh... I bet you want to see me modeling that lingerie, don't you?" I immediately had to gulp at the thought of _that_. "Hmm... okay, okay Kyle. We can go back upstairs and play alone together in the room... for a little while. I'll even promise not to drink anything out of the minibar." Wow, I hadn't even gotten that far - good thing that she... well, could I really depend on her to honor such a promise? "But you have to agree to come down again with me later, so that we can have more Vegas fun together!"

I thought about that for a second, but realized that I was unlikely to get a better deal out of Tess at the moment. "Alright, let's go." She squirmed out of my embrace, (which was kinduv a fun experience, and I'd probably have enjoyed it more if I hadn't been so worried,) and hurried off - not towards the elevators, but further down this hallway, away from the lobby. I didn't know where that led, and hurried after, wondering if Tess was already backing out on the deal. I'd halfway caught up when she pushed through a door and started up a flight of steps. Ohh... did she want to take the stairway instead of the elevator? Well, it's not like that would be so bad - we were only on the fourth floor, not the seventeenth or anything like that. Following Tess up the stairs also gave me a great view of her butt in motion, as it happened... which is plush and tight at the same time (or at least occupying a happy medium between those two descriptions,) and wrapped up in a pair of tight designer jeans that were just begging me to open them up. When we got to the fourth floor landing, Tess turned around, looked at me lurching up the final few stairs behind her, and giggled. "Is that a big stack of casino chips in your pants or are you just really happy that I was leading the way?"

"Pretty much happy," I admitted, and reached out to stretch one arm around her torso and tweak her bra strap affectionately. (That's something that Tess admitted she kind of likes back when we were dating last time, by the way.) "I can't wait until we're alone in that room together, you little tease. I might not even have enough patience for your little fashion show."

"Oh, come _on_ Kyle!" she said, her eyes wide with pretend horror... at least, I thought that she was partially pretending. "We **have** to do the fashion show! Come on, it won't take long." And as I sighed, she hurried out through the door into the hallway - and bumped into another pretty teenage girl. At first I thought, (as I followed Tess out,) that it was Liz, but though the resemblance was strong, this girl was a bit... well, her eyes were green, and there was something slightly different about her nose and chin. And the fact that she didn't recognize either of us was a clue, too. Tess looked back at me with that cocky grin, and leaned forward to kiss this girl on the lips.

For a second, the other girl seemed too stunned to react in any way. Then I think she kissed back briefly, but about four seconds in she pushed Tess away. Tess just cocked her head at the brunette in a sexy way, which made her shudder. "Sheesh!" And with that, the stranger turned and hurried past us. I smirked a little, thinking that she'd have a story to tell her parents or her friends (or both,) about the kind of weird things that could happen to you in Las Vegas.

While Tess was still sitting there smiling like she'd eaten a canary, (and was a cat, I guess,) I hurried past her, eager to get into the room before anyone noticed the incredibly hard bulge that felt like it was going to poke up past the waistband of my pants at any moment. (Or anyone else, if the brunette girl had happened to spot it with other things to distract her...) I had to admit that watching Tess kissing another girl, especially a girl who looked so much like Liz Parker, had only turned me on more. Hopefully, that was part of the reason that she'd done it.)

I was sitting on one of the beds in our room and looking at the door when Tess slunk in. "Okay, Kyle Valenti, now you have a choice," she said sexily. "I'm going to show off that white set of lingerie for you... you really don't have a choice about that - well, you can refuse to look, but I seriously doubt that would be a good move for someone in your position." I shook my head. "We can get to it right away... or I can do something first that I think will relieve your _impatience_. However... if I take care of you first... then you owe me three consequences that I get to determine later... things that I can order you to do, or order you to let _me_ do."

I shook my head, not a refusal but just a gesture of trying to think. Tess was... actually, she was giving me a deliberate cleavage shot just like I had been wondering about in the auditorium. I tried to think about the important things that I couldn't let go of. "Consequences can't involve you drinking alcohol, or anything that's completely unsafe. Safety applying, in this case, to either physical harm, or giving away your powers to total strangers."

"Aww." Tess pouted... or maybe it was a moue, I can never remember the difference. "Spoilsport. But okay. I love that you won't let anything get in the way of looking after me." That sentence somehow seemed uncommonly sincere, even though she wasn't in a completely earnest frame of mind right now. "Maybe because to look after me, it means you get to look at me." She giggled. "Does that mean you agree?"

"Umm... not yet, give me a minute," I pleaded. It was like sitting on the horns of a dilemma... I wanted to come so bad right that minute, but Tess' devious mind might well have me regretting that I'd made the agreement to abide by her consequences. "Take care of me... how?"

"Hmm!" Tess considered the question brightly. "Let's see... take care of you... with my hands and fingers?" She stretched them out in front of her. They were very pretty fingers, but I had to admit that I wanted more. "Take care of you... with my feet and toes?" She kicked off her sandals... I had to admit that she had pretty toes, and that was a fetish that didn't entirely lack appeal to me. "Or... take care of you with my lips, and tongue - my mouth, and maybe a bit of my throat?" My eyes immediately locked onto her lips as she was speaking: lush, sensuous lips, and I probably couldn't help from nodding my head up and down. "Oooh, I think we have a winner! Yes, I'll take care of you with my lips. It's the first time I've tried, but I think I'll be able to get the 'job' done. Is that a deal-maker?"

I laughed, shaking my head. "Yes, Tess Harding, you have a deal. Three consequences."

"Great!" She gestured me up, and bent down even further, to unfasten the button on my pants and slide down the zipper. There was something very sensuous about letting her slowly undress me, sliding the clothes off the lower half of my body, and I only moved at her specific direction, which she only made when there was something that she couldn't pull or remove on her own. Fairly soon I had nothing on but my t-shirt, and then nothing at all, as she pulled that above my head and off my arms, letting her fingers trail slowly across the skin of my own chest. My tool was pointing straight up into the air, as I sat on the edge of the bed, and it looked like it was even longer than its usual nine inches. Tess blinked and shook a little the first time she looked at it, and then got down onto her knees to examine me more closely. I expected her to reach out with her hand to touch it, but apparently she interpreted our agreement as 'only her mouth.' As she reached those glossy red-pink lips closer and stuck out her tongue to lick my head, I was definitely in no mood to complain.

If Tess was telling the truth about never having given a guy a blow-job before... well, she was undeniably very talented at it. Whether this was natural beginner's luck, practice on simulated objects, or some kind of freaky alien thing I wasn't sure, but... as the waves of pleasure kept coming at me, I focused as hard as I could on appreciating every single aspect of the moment, instead of simply closing my eyes, laying back, and drowning in the feelings that her mouth and her throat were creating in my wang. The soft moans that we were both making came together in an unusual symphony, (though hers were a bit muffled considering that her usual airways were partially obstructed,) and the sound effects of what she was doing directly added another level to that music - every lick and every suck an unusual note... okay, I'll drop that analogy now. Sorry. She was trying to stare up at me with those bright shining blue eyes as often as she could, and her hair was constantly falling onto the sensitive skin of my hips and my lap area. It felt so soft and silky. Then there was her chest, which was resting lightly on my thighs, moving and shifting slightly as she drew back to work her magic lips around my head, or pushed forward to swallow up more of my length, working me towards the opening to her throat...

"_Hgglgh_!" With a gagging sound, Tess quickly pulled back, and when she looked up at me again, the expression in her gorgeous eyes and her sweet face was no longer cocky and proud but upset, disappointed, and more than a little embarrassed. I just smiled, reaching out to caress her shoulder understandingly.

"Come on, it's okay," I assured her. "Deep throating... um, I mean, I've never done it myself obviously..." Little shudder - why had I had to put it that way? "But it... from everything I've heard and read, it's not nearly as easy as it might look. There's a gag reflex... a deep seated instinct to clear the throat when something is obstructing it. Learning to relax and get past the gag reflex is hard... and I'm not sure if I'll be any help."

"Oh," Tess said, looking if anything more crestfallen that she couldn't do this thing for me.

"But come on," I insisted, "I don't need a deep throat. You were doing _amazing_ - completely unbelievable." Tess cocked her head at me, the pleasure from the compliment starting to eat away at her more negative feelings. "Just go back to doing what you were doing, and don't worry about trying to take me in any further than you're ready for."

"Are... are you sure?" she asked. "I... I mean, you're so big, and I can only..."

I tried not to puff up in pride too much. "Don't worry too much about that." I thought about suggesting that she could use her hands on the rest of my shaft, but decided that she might take it the wrong way, considering her interpretation of our deal. "Most of the pleasure centers are concentrated up in the head, anyway. And if I can suggest one thing that shouldn't be too hard to try..."

"Um, yeah?"

"Hum while you're doing it." She looked doubtfully. "Really. There's something about the sound vibrations travelling up your mouth and onto my... my organ. I've never actually gotten a hummer, but, well, word in the locker room is that it's incredible."

"Alright, one hummer coming up!" Tess declared, and dove back onto my dick, almost literally. She was making a bigger production out of it than before, as if to make up for her perceived failing, licking wetly and then sucking hard, humming as much as she could, wrapping her mouth around the top of my tool as tightly as she could, her cheeks dimpling from the negative pressure so much that she looked almost silly that way. But it was still amazingly sexy, and I really didn't last long before erupting into an explosion of come, all of which disappeared so quickly that it almost seemed like Tess was inhaling it, sucking it away like a Hoover, instead of simply swallowing it. (I assume that she didn't actually inhale any because she didn't cough or have trouble breathing, but you never know entirely about half-alien physiology.) Then she stood up, a hand reaching up to check that her hair was okay, and shot out a brilliantly sexy smile at me. "Okay, now it's time?"

"Yeah, sounds great," I enthused, sliding back onto the bed in anticipation of really enjoying the show. Being an eighteen-year old boy, I'd like to be able to tell you that I was still as hard and stiff as I was when we got up to the room, but that actually wasn't quite true. My tower had definitely lost its peak and definition after coming in her mouth, though it hadn't quite gone soft and limp completely, (probably the circumstances and anticipation of what to come had something to do with that,) and was already starting to rebound towards half-mast. "Do, do you want to go into the bathroom to change and make a big entrance?" I prompted.

"No - no need." Tess giggled. "I'm wearing the white outfit right now." It took a second for that to penetrate, and she said the answer a half second after I had already realized it. "Underneath. Do you think I could be a natural at strip tease, Kyle?"

"Umm..." I had to suck in a long breath before answering. "Would not surprise me in the least." I'd never seen Tess in a situation exactly like this, obviously, but she does tend to move sexily even in the most innocent of circumstances, (or, once again, is that just me? my feelings coloring what I see?) and... Alright, I'll admit it. Back when she first moved into our house, I snuck a few good peeks at Tess Harding undressing. Definitely equal or better than anything I've ever seen in a nudie bar or on the net. But those times, she hadn't been aware of having an audience, had she?

Tess stepped back two paces, and then began with those tight jeans, opening up the button fly, and swiveling her ass around and around a few times before beginning to slowly push the denim down her hips. I shook my head in sheer wonder as something that looked like an incredibly tight, incredibly short, pair of white hot pants became visible underneath. The garment was covering up more skin than usual cotton underwear would, yet somehow it seemed more exciting and enticing. I can't really explain that. More and more lightly tanned, smooth and caressable thigh was revealed inch by inch, (how had Tess gotten a tan in the middle of the winter, and why hadn't I known anything about it? Had she just went to the tanning clinic downtown or snuck off somewhere to actually bathe in the wintry desert sun? Or was that another thing that could be done with just the wave of an alien hand?) And then Tess bent down, giving out another cleavage shot as she pulled the denim away from first one thigh, then the other, and tossed it across the room to land next to the wall, beneath the closed window. She smiled as she turned back to me, showing off her legs, which might not be incredibly long, but they were in perfect proportion for her petite frame, and beautifully shaped. Giggling, she did a kick into the air, lifting her bare foot a little above waist high. "Come on, Kyle, you're not saying anything!" she teased. "How am I doing so far?"

"Great teasing," I assured her, thinking that it was true on more than one level. "When are you going to get to the top?"

Tess made a little sheeshing sound through her toothy smile, and I suddenly realized that she was going to draw it out even longer because I had asked. Not that I really minded about that. My right hand had crept down to my crotch, and after a moment's shock I deliberately started stroking myself harder as I enjoyed the show, wondering what Tess' response would be if she realized what I was doing. Part of me was a little worried that she might get offended and call an immediate halt to the entire proceedings, but that really didn't seem too likely. For one thing, she'd promised to deliver a fashion show no matter what happened, and keeping promises was something that Tess was always very big on.

For the first little while, though, she didn't have a good chance to notice, because she wasn't really looking at me. Tess bent down so that her head was nearly upside down, shaking her head out, and then she turned her back to me, wiggling her butt yet again, and strutted back and forth to let me see her body in profile. When she did turn to stare at me again, I think she was momentarily startled to see me massaging my own thing, but then smiled a little bit, realizing that it spoke volumes for how much I was enjoying the show. She bent low, giving me a v-neck peek at the goodies again, teasingly undid one button, and worked the hem up so that a few more inches of midriff above the waist were visible. Her shirt was of the type that didn't unbutton all the way - undoing the buttons would make it a bit easier to pull it off over her head, but that was still basically the only way to take it off without doing something unusual to reshape the garment. I certainly didn't mind... in fact, I was looking forward to the moment when she pulled it off completely, and her blonde hair fell back into place. But first, apparently, Tess felt it necessary to stroke her hands over her own chest, and pinch her nipples through two layers of clothing. (I wasn't really in a mood to argue with her.)

Finally the self-fondling stage was done, and she pulled the shirt away. I appreciated the hair-tousled moment, and then my gaze dropped to study the other piece of white lingerie... some kind of a see-through, lacy bustier, which definitely looked sexy as hell, if more than a bit unusual. (She wasn't exactly your most usual girl.) Tess spun around slowly to let me see her from every side, and then climbed up onto the bed, the mane of golden hair falling around her face making her look, for a second, a bit like a stalking lioness on all fours... a damn sexy kind of cat. Somehow there was a piece of jewelry dangling in front of her cleavage that hadn't been there before... a golden chain with a metallic pendant that I couldn't make out immediately. She continued to crawl up until her head was next to mine, her body amazingly seductive and alluring in motion, covered only by those thin scraps of white cloth. Tess claimed my head with both of her hands and kissed me with a fire that I hadn't quite expected. The next thing I knew, we were lying next to each other on the bed, her pose relaxed. "So, does this mean that the fashion show is over?" I asked.

"Hmm... I guess so," she said, beaming. "The striptease might not be, depending on if you want to see the full... umm, the full - I actually can't think of anything to finish that with."

"Then don't say anything," I grinned, "and allow me." I hooked a finger into the waist of Tess' short-shorts, then another, and started to slowly draw them down. I feel very strongly about oral sex reciprocity... Tess had done a great job on me, and I was going to return the favor, as a matter of principle if nothing else. (I was also looking forward to it as a fun experience.) Her hidden treasures revealed were a sight to behold, and I could hardly wait enough to get the underwear completely off her legs before diving in, starting by licking the soft, sensitive skin on her upper thighs as a way of setting the mood, and then getting right to business. Tess stretched out on the bed, waving her arms a bit at the sensations I was able to deliver to her, and I took my time more than Tess did, (well, not like she could really have dragged it out much with me being as keyed up as I was,) - it was maybe twenty-two minutes before I brought her all the way to climax, and then I was able to keep her there, or nearly, for about two and a half more. It actually surprised me - I know I've got moves, but Tess is really something else - more, umm, more responsive than any girl I've ever been with before. Or maybe it was something about the chemistry between the two of us?

I kind of collapsed a bit after it was over, and all was still for a little while, and then I could feel Tess get up off the bed and very faintly hear the sound of her bare feet padding on the carpet. When I looked up, she had opened up the minibar and had poured a dizzying variety of different little bottles into one of the hotel room glasses... was that a long island ice tea? Oh, boy. The amount of alcohol in that one little glass...

"I... you know that I can't allow you to drink that," I said, trying to keep my voice low and steady. Heck, it could seriously _kill_ her! "Not even if you use a consequence on it."

"Well, of course not," she said, smiling. She was still wearing the white bustier and nothing else, and oddly it occurred to me that I desperately wanted to see her breasts free of that thin covering. "That's not the point. The **consequence**... is that you have to drink it!" She giggled, adding another shot to the glass, and presented it to me.

"Oh, boy," I muttered under my breath. I'd forgotten to include a clause to take care of that... or maybe I hadn't thought of it. If Tess could get me drunk... well, I wasn't sure what would happen next, but it would almost certainly be troubling. On the other hand, I **had** promised, and if I even tried to back out, Tess would get upset and probably would find some other way to make mischief. "Is... is that a long Island?"

"Actually, I think it's a Texas tea," Tess answered. "That's got bourbon whiskey in it."

Oh, boy. But I grabbed the glass and drained nearly half of it in one swallow before she thought of something even worse. Tess grinned to herself and bent down into the mini-bar again, grabbing a chocolate bar... something full of nuts, which I couldn't help thinking was a good idea... it'd help her keep her energy up. (Hmm... eating - would getting Tess to eat something more substantial lessen the effects of the alcohol? Then again, she hadn't been acting tremendously drunk ever since we got up here... or maybe it was just hard to notice whether she was acting unusual in this kind of circumstance.) I drank another swallow, and then, just as she was finishing the candy bar and not expecting it, I snuck up behind her and tried to pull that bustier up off her chest. That didn't work especially well, mostly because her initial reaction to the surprise was to lock her arms down and cross them, but I tickled the back of her upper arms and her tummy, (two places where Tess is _very_ ticklish,) and managed to get the stretchy white material pulled entirely off one arm, so that the rest was hanging oddly around her neck and shoulder, so it definitely didn't cover much.

When she finally complained, it wasn't specifically about tickling her or trying to strip her completely naked, which I found interesting. "Hey, you were supposed to finish the glass!"

"Yeah," I agreed. "But you didn't say when I had to finish it, or what I could do first." I tickled her again, and then let my fingers pass softly over her exposed breasts, brushing the pale and smooth skin and teasing her rosy buds. This was the first time since those first guilty peeks so long ago that I had seen Tess' chest completely uncovered, and in an odd way I was feeling disappointed that I wasn't completely sober to appreciate the magnificent sight properly. She wasn't huge, of course, but her breasts were bigger than they generally looked when she covered them up entirely, and I hadn't remembered, or expected, the perky firmness with just a hint of soft fondle-a-bility, or the way their rounded perfection took my breath away.

"Finish it, Kyle," she suggested in a low voice. "Just so that I don't keep getting distracted reminding myself that you still have to do that. Then we can _really_ get back into the fun - on a bed for preference. Or maybe even both beds!"

"Ahh... a good suggestion or two," I admitted. What with the surprise stripping and tickling, both of us were nearly lying on the carpet, some of Tess' weight pressing on my legs, and it wasn't exactly the most comfy of positions. I drained the Texas tea in two more mouthfuls, (damn strong stuff, but I think I like it!) and Tess concentrated on the two queen sized beds, slamming them together with her mind and creating a single huge romantic playground for us to romp upon. Which we lost no time in doing... I fooled around with her boobs for quite a long time, and then she said it was her turn and ran her talented hands over nearly every part of my body, not getting to the pecker until last, and then changing the focus of her touches, giving me a long-drawn out hand job that I think took nearly an hour. (I was starting to feel a little fuzzy from the tea at this point.) A good idea is a good idea, so I returned the favor that way too, running my fingers (and tongue) all over her body, and then trying to see how much directly sexual pleasure I could give her with them. As we hugged each other, both feeling deliriously happy afterwards, a question suddenly popped into my head. "You know, we've kinduv done everything... or a lot of the basics, actually, except for, umm..."

"Fucking the old fashioned way?" Tess suggested with a giggle.

I sighed. "Having sex full-contact, yeah." I hesitated, not sure how to put the next part. "Is... is there a reason that you, umm..."

Tess sighed and turned over onto her side, facing me. (As amazing a view as any other pose that I'd ever seen her in, but somehow this didn't feel like a moment for getting lost in the scenery.) "Well, I've heard some about what real alien sex is like." She giggled. "And, no offense, but I'm not sure if... if you're ready for it." Pause. "Or maybe I should say if we're ready for it."

I blinked. "Okay, first off... heard from whom?"

"Michael... and Isabel."

I'm not sure why this next bit popped into my head. Maybe I can blame my old friend Al Cohol. "Michael nailed Isabel?"

Tess' eyes grew wide, and then she slapped me hard on the shoulder (which made her tits shake and shudder.) "No, moron! With the ones they're actually with... Michael and Maria, Isabel and Alex. Remember?"

"Oh, uh, yeah." I tried to shrug, but somehow with the way I was still lying half on my stomach it didn't quite work. To be honest, my mind was racing a little with shock that Alex Whitman was actually getting laid... and with the stunningly beautiful Isabel. Michael and Maria didn't surprise me - they'd always been passionate souls. But - "Okay, so what exactly is it that they're ready for and I'm not?"

"Calm your macho self down, Buddha boy," Tess teased me. "I wasn't meaning that you're not physically in shape enough, or not skilled enough a lov-ah, or anything like that." She took a breath. "But, well... when one of us is in the mix, apparently sex becomes a deeper and more... emotionally intense experience than normal for humans. Of course, none of them are exactly sure about that, since there's no real basis for comparison yet." She smirked. "I guess you might be the first to have experienced both sides... if and when we do."

I jumped slightly. "Actually... well, I'm not **that** experienced or anything."

She grinned. "Okay, since you bring it up... how many girls have you had sex with?"

"Umm... two."

She blinked. "Liz and... Vicky Delaney."

What the heck... it was time to have done with the whole stinkin' lie. "_Not_ Liz."

"But..." Tess cocked her head, thinking about that. "Oh. Very interesting. A farce played for Max's benefit?"

"Think so. Liz didn't really explain - she just asked me for a favor and I went along with it."

"Alright. So... who was number two, or was Vicky number two, chronologically?"

I nodded. "Yeah, she was. Number one was... well, she was a long time ago. Sara Wilson. Very cute, and I liked her a lot, but... well, I don't really feel like getting into the whole story, especially since I'm not sure you've completely answered my question, about alien sex. Something about emotionally intense?"

Tess shook her head. "Umm... I thought it was done. Long story short, casual sex may be impossible for hybrids... or with hybrids." She sighed. "Isabel said that she was glad that she had never done it with anybody but Alex. He's her one and only, I'm sure of it. So... so I don't want to unless I'm just as sure for me... you get it?"

"Actually, yeah, that makes a lot of sense," I admitted, sighing with disappointment. "Though I definitely have to admit that I'd love to with you."

She smiled wanly again. "Okay, I think it's time to get dressed again and head back downstairs."

I grinned at her. "Is that your second consequence?"

"Nah, I'm not going to waste a consequence, because you already promised to come back down with me later, and it's later already!"

I thought about trying to argue with that logic, but it would be an uphill climb with both of us more than a little under the influence, and I decided that I didn't care. "Okay... but I think I'd like to take a quick hot shower before getting dressed. Yourself?"

"I'd love to shower with you," she giggled, and that wasn't what I had in mind... but hey, who was I to deny a hot blond love kitten who wanted to get hot and steamy with my own self? Actually, aside from some kissing, and an awful lot of scrubbing each other, nothing too hot happened in the shower, and I got well air-dried by the electric fire, and put on a big baggy yellow t-shirt and loose fit jeans. Tess seemed to have a different idea for her wardrobe this time out.

She got dressed in the bathroom, so that I didn't see her preparing or even what clothes she had picked until she made a grand entrance. Lady in red, again, with a vengeance. She was wearing a red dress... short of skirt, tight all over, and a neckline that allowed a peek of cleavage and a trace of boob slope to be seen. All that appeared to be holding it up was two thin red straps, and the determination with which the fabric was hugging her curves. (Lucky fabric!) She wore red leather heels too, maybe three inches high, and her hair was down, straightened, and swept back somehow so that the lower halves of her ears, and the ruby earrings that glinted upon them, could clearly be seen. She was wearing a little more jewelry too - a gold charm bracelet on her wrist, a few rings. No necklace, but that reminded me of something.

"The pendant you had on earlier... it seemed to appear and disappear out of nowhere. What was the deal?"

"What pendant, Kyle? What do you mean?" Tess kept up the confused look for about ten seconds before giggles began to erupt from deep within her, (which might have been none too comfortable in that dress.) Stepping towards the counter top and reaching out, her hand came back with a little length of metallic chain dangling from it. "No big mystery - I put it on this morning and then got annoyed at it dangling in front of my boobs and drawing strangers' attention to them, so I kind of tucked it up onto my shoulder under the white top. Of course, anyone who looked would still have been able to see some of the chain going across my neck, a bit like a choker. It fell out again when I took the top off, obviously... that was when you saw it, right?" I nodded. "And before I started mixing your drink I took it off and put it down."

"Alright," I said. "What's the design on it?"

"Oh, something that we found in that underground launch silo in Colorado, last fall." She passed the pendant over to me, and I saw that the shape molded in relief against a five-sided background was a relatively harmonious bundle of squiggles, with a kind of puffy-cloud form in the bottom left. "We still don't understand a lot of the Antarian symbology, but as nearly as Max and I can tell, this one is about following your heart to destiny."

For a second the reference to Max Evans and destiny stung, but I let that go and smiled. Tess had told me that she wasn't holding onto what she felt for Max anymore, which suggested that following her heart might mean going my way. "Cool," I decided. "You don't have to wear it downstairs if you dislike the attention from strangers, but I like it," I told her meaningfully. Tess thought about that, went to her suitcase to get a red purse, and dropped the pendant, along with a few other things, into it.

"Alright, we ready to hit the blackjack tables now?"

Hmm. "I guess so," I said, heading for the door and holding it open for her. "But... well, why blackjack?"

She looked both ways in the hotel hallway before answering me in a whisper. "Because I **can't** cheat at it... or at least, I haven't thought of a way that doesn't seem too risky. Roulette and craps don't seem to have much excitement because of that factor."

I smiled... score one for the appeal of risk in gambling. "You, hmm... you could try to change the pattern on the dealer's down card, and make him bust."

"Yeah, I guess so. But that kind of detail work is _really_ hard to do, sight unseen. I'm not sure if I could even adjust a playing card that I was looking at well enough to fool someone else."

"Max did it once," I said conversationally, leading the way down to the stairs again. It would be a nice exercise getting down, and we'd have a batter chance to talk in privacy than waiting for an elevator.

"_Really_? Max?" Tess shook her head in disbelief, throwing hair this way and that, and one thick lock of blonde silk fell down in front of her left shoulder, reaching down to within a few inches of her bosom. "I... somehow I found that very hard to believe."

"Well, I heard it third-hand, I guess, but I'm pretty sure it happened," I insisted. "He adjusted his hand to _lose_."

"Okay, then now I believe it," Tess laughed. "Who was the intermediary - Liz?"

"Yep," I nodded. "On the father-child camping weekend, several months before you came to Roswell. He got into a poker game with his father, Alex's, and Liz's. Came down to him and Liz's dad, and he let Mister Parker win. Doesn't that say it all?"

"I guess." Tess sighed. "Okay, hmm... any idea how much I should be betting to start with? I don't want to risk losing too much."

"Yeah," I agreed, nodding. "But as long as we have a little seed money, you can win it back with something else." Tess thought about that, and nodded back.

We ended up playing at a thousand-dollar limit table, losing a little bit more than usual but not too badly. I had fun with varying my bet size, making it look a bit, superficially, as if I were counting cards, but not actually tracking the count in the slightest, wondering if the pit boss would try to throw me away from the table. And it occurred to me that the rigidity of blackjack, compared to the other games of chance about, was something that Tess could possibly take advantage of, if she tried hard enough. If she could sense the hormones in my blood, she could probably detect what cards were next in the shoe, and adjust her strategy accordingly. Then again, even though Tess wasn't acting too outrageous just now, she probably still had some alcohol in her system, and it probably wasn't a good idea to suggest that she do _anything_ with her powers right now. Just in case.

After losing about fifteen thousand, Tess decided that she had had enough of blackjack, and we went out to grab a bite to eat again... eating at a trendy little restaurant off the lobby - she had a grilled fillet of chicken and fettuccini in a spicy tomato sauce, and I had home fries and a roast beef sandwich that came with a little glass bowl of beef stock that you could dunk a little bit of the sandwich into at a time. Really very tasty.

"How's your fettuccini?" I asked Tess. "Haven't **quite** managed to drop pasta down into your cleavage yet I notice."

"Oh, is **that** what you were noticing?" she shot back, and I tried to shake off an encroaching flush of redness. "Actually, the pasta is great, and the chicken absolutely fuckin' delicious, but I kind of wish that I hadn't worn such a short dress." She shifted around a little on her chair as if she couldn't find a comfortable position, which was probably the case. I nodded with as much sympathy as I could muster up.

"So, what's next?" I asked.

"Umm... dessert!" Tess decided. She flagged down and got a waiter to bring us a dessert menu. She ordered the biggest fudge and whipped cream sundae they had, while I tried a French crepe, and we each ended up eating about a third of the other's. Finally the sinful eating was done, the bill was paid off in full, and the subject returned to discussing Sin city activities.

"We've actually got to check out the video arcade," Tess decided. "I know... last time I only went there because I had no other choices, but it was really pretty cool... or would have been if I'd had someone as cool as you to enjoy it with. Okay?"

How could I resist that pretty face? "Okay, sure, I'm up for that," I agreed. Video games were never really a bad thing, and a fancy place like this would probably have some kick-ass ones, like a partial slice out of one of that premium arcade I went to last summer in Albuquerque. Tess led the way, except that she didn't really know the way to the arcade in this hotel, so we both got well and truly lost before I finally asked a bellboy, who got us right back on track. We stepped in, loaded up with some quarters, and surveyed what was available.

"Oooh, cool, they've got the X-man," Tess said, pointing.

I couldn't spot it. "What, X-men versus street fighter?"

"_No_!" Tess turned to glare at me. "Come on, you know what I think of one-on-one duel games. That's not my idea of entertainment. It's the station over there, with six different player controls."

"Ohh... the one where the next to last big boss is mystique impersonating magneto?" I sighed. "Played that one so much in junior high that I think I'm still bored with it."

Tess pouted at me, but I stood reasonably firm. "Maybe it's actually a sequel," she said without terribly much conviction.

"Oh, hey!" I exclaimed in my own turn. "Star wars immersion capsules! Those are pretty decent."

Tess quirked her face. "Yeah, but they're single player. I wanted to do something together."

"Okay, a compromise then. We do the star wars together, at least through the death star sequence, and then play X men."

"Okay, I guess." So we sat down in two of the little star wars capsules, which were set up so that there were generic controls in front of you between your legs... (Well, generic in that they had to control three different vehicles in the game, not generic as in being similar to a lot of other video games,) and a quarter slot, and screens all around - mostly a one-sixty degree panorama to the front, and just a few 'windows' to the side and behind. The game began, and suddenly I was in Luke Skywalker's x-wing fighter zooming through space, approaching the imperial fleet and the Death Star.

My hand-eye co-ordination was generally very good, (though I wasn't at my best right now, on account of alcohol,) and I still remembered some of the strategy and tactical tricks from the last time I had a chance to play this game, and I did pretty well at shooting _Tie_ fighters out of the ether and flying through the complicated maneuvers. From what I could see of Tess' capsule, it was obvious that she was having a harder time, needing to feed more and more quarters into the beast just to remain alive. I tried to shout out helpful hints, but I couldn't really see which stages she was up against, and she didn't seem to want my assistance, so I gave that up and focused on my own battles. Soon I was into the final run through the Death star trench, with Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon covering me from enemy fire, and the final countdown for the Proton torpedo shot began.

Unfortunately, I was a little nervous and shot too early. Damn the force, anyway. So I survived, but the Death star remained. Mission failed. I waited through the introductory scenes to the 'Empire strikes back' mission, not pressing the button to skip ahead, so that Tess could catch up. I knew that I'd hear what happened when she finished her own run, and I wasn't wrong... just as I started with my hover-scooter on Ice Planet Hoth, trying to figure out where the giant Imperial walkers were, Tess cried out "Whoo-hoo! Take **that**, Death star!"

"What... you actually got it?" I asked, upset. It was a pretty difficult shot to make... perfect timing and aim required, no second chances.

"Yep, okay. I'll feed a few more quarters in, but not many, I'm warning you." Sure enough, after a few minutes of the second mission, Tess climbed out of her capsule, and I did a crazy kamikaze blitz at one of the walkers to kill myself. Then we played the X-men game - it was the same one I remembered, but I had fun. Tess let me be Wolverine, and she played Storm, and the two of us made a really decent team, wiping out sentinel androids, lizard-people, and all the other weird bad'uns in the game. A few other teenagers joined in half-way through, though some of them dropped out after putting a few dollars in, and we even made it all the way to the end and defeated Magneto, though I'm too embarrassed to tell you how many quarters that took.

"Okay," Tess said, wrapping herself around my arm as we walked away and whispering into my arm. "I've decided on your second consequence."

"What? Oh." I'd almost managed to forget about those. "What's it going to be, then?"

"Streak across the lobby in only your underpants," she breathed, and giggled.

Big sigh. I wasn't quite sure whether the underpants were better than nothing, or if they'd just make me seem pitiful and kinduv lame. "Okay, well, I guess I have no choice."

"None at all," Tess breathed so softly I could hardly hear her, an odd grin on her face.


	3. Chapter 3

Okay, come on, come on. Gotta think of this like - umm, what's it like? It's kinduv like a football game. Pretend that somebody lateraled you the ball in the Rose bowl. All that you've got to do is get through the field of defenders to score the winning touchdown.

Oh, and you haven't got much of a uniform. And the field is a little more crowded than usual. But on the other hand, none of them are really _trying_ to block you, much less tackle you. Okay, three, two, _run_!

I dashed out into the lobby, trying to set a course that would allow for the most flat-out speed, and the least awkward dodging. Come to think of it, why am I so nervous? I'm just runnin' here, and I'm not even totally naked. This underwear might as well be a very brief pair of running shorts... except that I'd usually still wear some underwear under running shorts. Still, an athletic body in motion is a beautiful thing.

Aggh, some guy with a briefcase walking right into my path. **Look out where you're going,** jerk! An athletic body trying to maneuver around idiots is a slightly less beautiful thing I think. But I managed to avoid him, without losing all momentum, however, I'm not quite sure of where my original course was, or if it matters. Well, the other end of the lobby has to be generally over there - just keep moving. Acck! Huge group of junior high-aged kids, seemingly most of them girls - staring at me and giggling. Probably better to give them as wide a berth as possible. Who the heck brings thirty or thirty-five junior high-aged kids to Sin City anyway? Maybe they're going to be going on an educational tour of Hoover dam. Hoover dam is here in Vegas, right? Or at least nearby.

_Whoomph_. Distracted by thoughts of Hoover Dam, I managed to do the stupidest thing possible... collided right into a respectable old lady, so perfectly typecast that she might have been a bit player drawn by the Simpsons animators. Oh well, at least I didn't really tackle her full on and knock her down - might have broken the poor lady's hip or something. But she stares right at me, and gasps, "Oh, lord."

"It's kind of a bet, ma'am," I blurted out to her, and rushed away, the goal in sight.

From behind me as I ran, I heard a faint cry of "Well, good luck!" Huh. Guess she wasn't quite as stuffy as she looked. Gave a security guard the slip, ducked into an empty corridor, and then slipped into the small unisex wheelchair restroom. Tess was already waiting there, with my clothes.

"Did... did you see any of it?" I asked. "Or were you here the whole time."

"I saw through your eyes," she whispered, a little enigmatically. "Here's your stuff. Put it on quick - I think the security guard is coming.

So I dressed, and Tess came out first, distracting the guard so that he didn't notice as I slipped out of the washroom. We met up near the elevators. "That was so great!" she squealed quietly, holding one of my arms.

"Oh... yeah, lots of fun for the girl spying on it. You wouldn't feel that way if you were the one who had to run." Once the words left my mouth, I had a suddenly uncertain feeling.

"Nah, I'll do it if you want." She started to tug her shirt up just a little. "In fact, maybe you should have said something before - we coulda done it together."

I smiled. "No, because then who'd have held the clothes?"

"Umm... good point, yeah."

"And you shouldn't do it right now in the same place, at least... the guards are probably paying closer attention now, just in case."

"Alright, well, you tell me where and when, buddy." Right then the elevator door opened. "Are we heading back to the room?"

"Umm, yeah, I guess, for a bit." I sighed. "We've had quite a bit of excitement... I kinda feel like just vegging out a bit - watching a movie on the TV together or something like that."

"Hmmm... okay, I guess," Tess agreed, and smiled a smile that was somehow full of the other possibilities of the two of us alone together in a fancy hotel room. Yeah, there was that too. Somehow the streaking consequence, even if it wasn't totally hardcore, had managed to get me feeling a bit horny, and the thought of Tess running through a crowded place in, say, only a demi-bra and lacy panties... yeah - that was definitely a turn-on.

So we headed up to the room, and while I started going through the on-screen hotel TV guide, Tess noticed that a red light on the phone was blinking, and managed to get it to play its message over the speaker phone. It was a familiar voice saying just four words. "What the hell, Kyle?" Max Evans. Aww, let him stew for a while, I don't care if he was angry at Tess and I for getting our own room, or not checking in, or whatever it was. Tess shrugged and sat next to me on the bed, some of her blonde curls brushing against my cheek and her butt touching one of my legs.

"Ooh, sons of glory!" I said, spotting a basketball movie and flipping over to it. Tess turned around and gave me a very sour look. "Of course... if you want to use your last consequence and say that we watch something else, that's fine." She frowned, obviously not wanting to spend her last bit of leverage on something so minor. I think that for a moment she was contemplating trying to tease me into watching something else... or doing something that didn't involve the television at all, but apparently she decided against it, resuming her position lying next to me and giving my movie a try. I think as the main characters were introduced and the camera played over sequences of the players doing drills, she was starting to appreciate it on a few levels.

About the time that a series of disappointing losses had started to make the team squabble among themselves and the star point guard quit the team, though, she shrugged and got up. "Want some room service?"

"Hmmm." Thought about that. "What I really feel like is a big pizza just loaded with all kinds of stuff." Considered the idea further. "Can room service do pizzas, or do you call delivery to your hotel room?"

"You know, I think... wait a second." She went over to the end table near the window, which had one of those little stand-up flippers full of little ads and friendly reminders from the hotel management. "Yeah, here we go." She snickered. "There's an extension you can call on the hotel phone to be put through to the local Papa John's, and they get your room number on call trace. Guess that's one way to do it."

"Sounds good," I agreed. Still wasn't paying too much attention to the talk of dinner, because I could just tell that there was going to be a big shouting match between two of the players starting any minute, and I didn't really want to miss any of it. "I think you know what I'd like well enough to order."

"Oh yeah, and what about what I'd like?" she countered.

"Sssh! The brawl is starting." Somehow without even looking at her, I could feel Tess' eyes roll at me.

I had managed to forget about the pizza by the time it arrived, getting more and more deeply engrossed in the struggles of the team, but when Tess set the pizza, and a bottle of a good pale ale, next to me, I was certainly happy enough to start enjoying them. The pizza was a gigantic twenty-one incher, split up into sixteen or eighteen narrow slices, loaded with canadian bacon, mushrooms, green peppers, and tiny little chopped pieces of tomato... pretty much my favorite stuff to put on a pizza. Beer was great too, though I hadn't really meant to be drinking any more today... had Tess done that deliberately? Suddenly panicking, I looked over at her - my guard had slipped - had she ordered something alcoholic for herself? No, she was sipping out of a classic coke can. My suspicions didn't quite end there, though... there was still the minibar, and she could probably have acquired a bottle of rum or something and drained it without me noticing. When I got up and stepped close, though, Tess seemed to know what I was thinking.

"Go ahead - sniff it," she offered. "I didn't put anything in it."

"Umm... that's okay, I trust you," I muttered. Probably wouldn't have been able to tell if it was vodka by sniffing it, anyway, and she'd get mad if I tried tasting it. Plus... I really don't think that Tess would have lied to me about it, anyway. "Did you take any pizza for yourself?"

"Yep." She tapped the table next to her chair, which had two slices of pizza resting on... on what looked like a few strips of toilet paper laid out to keep them from sitting directly on the table. Hmm... yeah, no paper plates (or plates of any kind,) no paper towels, so short of using actual hotel towels that was probably the best solution. Except... well, she could have eaten straight out of the box, with me. Somehow I felt a little disappointed that she hadn't gone that route.

As the movie continued to play, and the two of us munched, my thoughts started to wander even further in that direction. Finally I moved aside and patted the bed next to me. "Come on, why don't you make yourself comfortable?"

"Hmm... maybe you're just thinking that **you'd** be more comfortable with a soft a slightly squeezable babe sitting next to you?" Tess joked. But she got up and took the place that I'd offered, bringing her makeshift paper plate and pizza with her. After a few moments, she moved her pizza back into the box, crumpled up the tee-pee, and shot it with perfect aim over into the wastebasket next to the TV table. "Wow, not bad," I admitted, commenting on both the aim, and the lines of Tess' body as her arms moved. (The fact that she'd made a shot like that in the middle of a basketball movie seemed especially weird.)

Somehow, now that Tess was sitting next to me, I ended up paying **less** attention to her than when she'd been in the chair. Had a few slices more pizza, then stopped once I wasn't particularly hungry anymore, and possibly dozed through a bit of the movie. I was definitely awake when a steamy seduction scene began, though, between the team captain and the beautiful head cheerleader from the rival school... a blonde cheerleader, who actually bore a shocking resemblance to Tess herself. (I might flatter myself by saying that the captain looked a little like me... but I don't have a face that good and I definitely don't have all of his inches.)

The scene was surprisingly sexy for a fairly low-budget PG-13 affair that didn't really show anything... the blonde chick's voice, especially, somehow sent a thrill through my chest that went right down to my pecker... and within just a minute or two, I was starting to get stiff. And then, before I even realized what was going on, I felt something else touch my rod... fingers, but fingers that were slick and slippery somehow, which added to the experience. I looked away from the screen and beside me - it was Tess who had grabbed me, pretty obviously, and as far as I could tell, she had somehow managed to oil her hands up with pizza grease without managing to have any crumbs sticking to the oil. It was kinduv a weird mental picture, (I'm wondering what you guys will think when you read the description, as I write this paragraph,) but definitely a sexy sensation. The wide and faintly cat-like grin on Tess' face as she jacked me up definitely helped. The seduction scene that was going on on the tv screen ended before the one that was playing out in the hotel room... well, if seduction is the right term. In fact, by the time Tess was done with me, (especially that one particular part of me,) I wasn't even paying attention to the movie anymore. I looked up at the girl on the other side of the bed, completely astounded at her chutzpah, her mind-blowingly playful sexuality, and... um, well, her jaw-dropping beauty, yeah, that'll do for the magic three.

A few minutes later, I went into the bathroom to take care of some business, and when I came back out, the tv had been turned back off, and Tess was bending down to put the pizza leftovers into the mini-fridge. (Great view of her ass, and her thighs, in that pose - she was still wearing the short red dress, and it was riding up - either just enough, or not quite far enough, depending on your taste. I couldn't make up my mind, myself.) "Hey, how did you fit the big pizza box into that little thing?" I asked belatedly, once she had closed the fridge door, stood up, turned around and noticed me.

"Umm... the only possible way - by turning the big pizza box into a smaller pizza box?" she replied. With a wave of her hand, Tess indicated the bed, where a fairly large amount of cardboard was left, maybe half of the material in the original box. A square piece had been cut out of one corner. Yeah, that did make sense. I'd probably have been able to work something like that out if I was sober and tried hard enough, so it would definitely be possible for Tess using her powers. "I'm bored," she continued. "Can we go out exploring again?"

"Umm, sure I guess." I didn't really feel like being out and about... which probably had something to do with the post-orgasm laziness effect, but I didn't really want to disappoint Miss Harding or piss her off either. So we locked up the room and went back downstairs in the elevator. Spent a little time wandering through the casino, didn't really gamble much, and wandered around the boutiques and other businesses set up not far from the hotel lobby.

Tess stopped and looked up at one sign, and I turned to read it too. _impulsive hearts_ Wedding Chapel. Oh boy. And just then, Tess turned to me, and blurted out. "Your third consequence. Marry me."

My breath caught in my throat for a long moment. "Do... do you really mean that?"

She hesitated. "No." An embarrassed smile. "I mean, there's **really** not much point if I have to make you do it as some sort of stupid dare, is there? Come on, let's go. Do you wanna try the dance club?"

"No, just a second." Tess turned around to face me, an odd expression on her face. "A few questions. If I **really** asked you right now - would you get married?"

"Umm... I'm not sure," Tess admitted. "Maybe you'd have to ask me for real to find out." She stepped back closer. "I realize it's kinduv corny and I have no idea for how we'd make it work after we came home... even if we could. But deep down, if I ask myself if I could see myself becoming your wife at this point in my life..." she giggled slightly, probably about the unintended rhyme, "then I'd have to say 'yes.' I'm not quite sure if that's enough."

"It's something pretty incredible," I admitted. I thought about the corresponding question myself. Could I picture myself being a married man at the end of the day, a husband? It was a wild stretch. But if the bride was Tess... then I wanted myself in that picture, yes. "Another question - are we _still_ drunk?"

"Hmmmm..." Tess considered the question. "I'm not really sure. Things haven't seemed particular clear and sober ever since I grabbed that drink in the auditorium, but I don't really seem especially loopy either. What does it matter, anyway? Aren't we _supposed_ to be drunk if we're getting married in Vegas?" She giggled cutely. "What about you, Kyle?"

"Umm... I've mostly come down I think... no headache though - that musta been good stuff in the minibar. The beer is probably helping cushion my system." I wasn't really sure if my judgment was completely on the level at this point... maybe there were other factors than alcohol affecting it. Is it literally possible to be drunk on love, or high on hormones for that matter? "Tesia Christine Harding... will you marry me? I don't have a ring for you... and probably won't spring for one unless I get an answer of yes." I did go down on one knee, though - what the heck. Some guy walking past whooped out and pumped an arm in the air to cheer me on. Nobody else seemed to notice - I guess this happens often enough in Vegas that it's not even worth watching for the tourists.

"Ehhh...!" Tess seemed too conflicted to come up with an answer for a long moment, and I stood back up. (Whimsical chivalry only takes me so far.) "_How_... How did you find out that name, Kylan Mark Valenti?" Huh! Obviously I wasn't the only one who had ever been snooping... not that I'd ever really hidden my own full name, but still... Wanting to get a little less conspicuous, I led the way over to a little bench nearby that happened to be empty.

"Umm... wait a second," I said after we sat down. "You **know** that I know your middle name, Tess. You told me, after you used it as a fake name up in Denver when we were trying to sting that ex-FBI special agent for selling alien records over the Internet..." We had both used our middle names as fakes then, actually, which explained how she knew mine too.

"Not **that** name," Tess insisted. "Tesia." She pronounced it with a zzzz sound in the middle, while I'd used more of a hissing ss, but oh well. "I **hate** that. Made, umm, I made Ed promise that he'd never call me that, or tell anyone that that was my 'full' name, back when I was eight! Did... did you somehow find my _Birth certificate_, Kyle?"

"Umm, no, actually," I stuttered. "Michael showed me this alien memory key that... that Ed made just a few minutes before he died. I guess he forgot to stick by your agreement." Sighed. "How did you know about Kylan?"

Tess blushed slightly. "Snuck a look at your birth certificate, what else? Dad really should keep it in a safer place than that file folder of 'family stuff' in his desk."

Something struck me as odd about that... over the past few months, Tess had actually started to refer to my father as 'Dad' instead of 'Mister Valenti' or 'Jim.' Not to his face... in fact, I'm not sure if she's said it around anyone but me yet. Somehow that seemed to underline the strangeness of what we'd be getting into if we went through with anything like this... that we were already living in the same house, and being raised by the same parental figure - and talking about getting married. But heck - at least nobody would have to sleep out on the couch - unless I really pissed my wife off, that was. Just like any other married man.

I took a deep breath. "The big questions is still kinda hanging there in the air between us," I pointed out. "If you don't answer it soon, I may take it back."

"Oh, that's a great sigh," Tess laughed back. "I hesitate and change the subject for what, about a minute, and already you're getting fretful. Maybe I don't _want_ to marry somebody so... so flighty and impatient anymore, how about that?" She shook her head with a small sadness that I wasn't sure if it was real or a put-on. (That's one of the things about Tess, she's kinduv a natural actress, able to conceal her feelings so well that even the people who know her best can't see through the fakery. Like her more obvious deceptive talent, the mind-warping thing, it can be a two-edged sword - I've often wondered, even at very angsty moments, if she were just putting me on.)

"I mean, if we did this, how long would it be real for? How long before you decide that you're tired of being a married teenager, tied down to one girl as a college freshman? How many years would we have before calling it quits? I... I know that you can't predict what'll happen in the future, but..." she broke off, shaking her head.

"Just tell me what you want of me," I whispered softly, running one hand through her amazingly soft hair, not for my own pleasure in it, but out of hopes that that would calm Tess down. "I... I'd like it to be happily ever after with you, Tess. But you're right - I can't promise that, can't be sure that I've got what it takes for the long haul. I'm sorry."

She looked up at me again. "Gut check... how long do you think you _are_ good for?"

I laughed. Something about this whole scenario seemed very surreal... bargaining over years for a marriage proposal... but I didn't want to take it back entirely, and Tess had a right to know the score, as well as I could put it. "Minimum... three good years. Average of seventeen." Tess shot me a look. "There's a wide variance."

Tess couldn't restrain a laugh. "Okay, Kyle... I'm still not sure of the wisdom of any of this, but between Vegas' mysterious charms and your own, I can't resist. Yes, I'll marry you today - or tonight, or whatever it turns out to be." She giggled and jumped to her feet, pulling me along behind her. "We'll need rings, and flowers, and a white dress for me." She shot me a coy look just in time to spot me gulp silently. "Come on, surely you didn't think I was the type of girl who'd walk down the aisle in a bright red hussy outfit like this?"

I thought it was smarter not to say anything.

#

It didn't take much shopping to take care of Tess' needs... the three big ones or the other 'incidentals' that occurred to her. This was Vegas after all, and there were boutiques and booths in the plazas selling just about anything that a fussy bride might insist on... or a more detail-oriented groom than me, for that matter.

Myself, I'd have been pretty much satisfied to stand up at the altar in my t-shirt and my loose fits, but it became clear enough early on that this was simply **not to be.**

"C'mon, we've got enough money," Tess insisted. "And there must be two white-tie men's tailors in the lobby. You can wear a tux off the rack."

"A tux?" I said, trying not to whine. "Hey! I actually packed a nice black suit when we came? Just in case there was, umm, was a formal dinner thing like last time."

"Yeah?" Tess replied. This was while she was browsing through wedding dresses. "And just where is this suit, exactly, right now?"

"Umm, well... oh, right." I sighed. "It's still in the room I was sharing with Alex, back at the wherever-it-was hotel. Near to where Max is probably waiting for us to drag ourselves in, if he's not actively scouring the strip for us."

"Right," Tess said softly. "And do you really think it'd be a good idea to go back for it?" She was asking me as if I were an eleven-year old or something, but maybe I'd nearly asked for that.

Let's see. Go back, almost certainly run into someone else in the gang... no, no thanks. For one thing, probably someone would ask why I wanted the suit so badly, and then it'd be almost impossible to get back out before they found out about the wedding. And I **didn't** want that to happen... didn't want them to try to talk us out of it, which i thought that several people would, and not even if they just wanted to come and watch. All of this magical stuff between Tess and I had just been for the two of us, and I wanted the wedding to continue that trend... just the two of us, and a slightly corny Vegas priest and a organ lady with gray hair up in a bun. The quintessential Vegas elopement. Well, except for the Elvis impersonator. I could do without any Kings around - not Evans, and not Presley.

"Okay, okay," I sighed. "We'll buy something new. But **not** a tux. Another simple, classic suit. That okay?"

"Well, I guess Kyle," she drawled with a twinkle in her eye. "Black suit, yeah, that can work."

Finally everything was ready, and we went to the chapel and waited our turn in line, and chatted a bit with a couple who were a few years older than we were... the guy was going to college in Wisconsin, and the girl was interning with the local telephone company. "Hey," the girl, Wendy, said after a moment. "Since neither of us have attendants here, how about we trade off? You guys can be our best man and maid of honor, and then we'll do the same for you.

I blinked, looking over at Tess because she was more likely to care about that sort of thing. "Um, okay, yeah," Tess smiled, seeming to appreciate the zaniness of the idea.

"We could just go for a double wedding," Ryan said a little doubtfully.

"No, those are so last year," I said. "Unless, um, are they cheaper than singles?" Tess swatted me on the arm. Okay, yeah, trying to save a few bucks by getting wedding-mates was probably not the best signat to be sending.

"Wait a second," Tess sudenly realized. "We're going to be both standing up there in wedding dresses, Wendy - that'd be too weird."

"Hmm." Wendy thought about that. "Well, I've got something else I could... could maybe change into, but yeah, that sounds like maybe the whole thing is more trouble than it's worth."

Tess looked at me, and I could tell that she was uncertain too. It was a cute idea, and fun, and Tess didn't really need to worry about changing - she could alter her dress with the wave of a hand, though we'd have to go through a few hoops to make it not look suspicious. But Ryan and Wendy had been before us in line, and it didn't seem fair to make her change out of her wedding dress just to come and stand up by Tess' side. "Yeah, too bad," I said after a moment. Nice to meet you, and good luck!"

"Yeah," Ryan said. "How about we all meet up back here in the waiting room afterwards, anyway? Just to congratulate each other?"

"Sounds great," Tess said, and giggled. It wasn't long after that that their name got called, and we waited, and then one other couple went through, and a few minutes after that Ryan and Wendy were back. "How was it?" Tess asked.

"Umm... great," Wendy admitted. "A little too short, but what the heck." She turned, and looked back at Ryan and grinned. "Can you believe that we're actually married?"

"Umm, no, not really," he admitted. "So, c'mon guys, tell us a little about life in Roswell. Ever think you've seen an alien?"

I had a bit of a hard time coming up with an answer to that question. "Sheesh, hardly," Tess said without a scrap of hesitation. "You've seen too many movies, It's just a little city in the middle of the desert. Nothing special really."

"How did you meet?" Wendy pressed. Just like a girl, I guess - always wanting to hear the romantic story.

"Umm, she was new in town, and came up to me, saying that she needed some help getting caught up in her classes and wanted to know if I was up for a study date," I said. Tess blushed slightly, and Ryan chuckled. "Which is, umm, especially odd, since I definitely wasn't someone who excelled at schoolwork that year."

"I... I had other reasons for picking you, yeah," Tess said. That was true enough, but of course neither of us were going to go into the _real_ motives that Tess had had for picking my company that night. "I, umm, I saw Kyle around a few other times after that, but nothing really notable or worth mentioning... until the first time his Dad let me crash on their couch, and he wandered into the living room in his boxer shorts not expecting me to be there."

"_Whoa_," Wendy muttered. "What... what was the story behind that? Why were you crashing there?"

Fortunately, before either of us had to explain, our names were called, and we hurried over to the chapel proper. I went down to the front right away, chatting briefly with the minister and the organist, (who pretty much matched my mental picture of expectations,) while Tess got ready for her big entrance, that she'd made me pay extra for, even though there wasn't anybody to see it except for the phtographer and the rest of us. The basic package just had the bride and groom coming up to the front of the chapel together, but if Tess wanted to do the big 'here comes the Bride' moment anyway, I wasn't going to deny it to her. The organist started up the familiar theme, and Tess strode out of a little cloakroom at the back of the chapel, and I turned around just as the photographer snapped off his first pic.

I'll admit it, I was blown away. I'd looked at Tess in the dress before that moment, of course - we weren't really worrying about any of the usual superstitions, and there hadn't seemed to be any classy way to prevent it. But somehow, I don't think I'd really _seen_ her until that moment - seen how radiantly beautiful she was in that moment of moments, wearing her white gown that seemed all kinds of good things at once. (No, I'm not going to list any of them this time - you can probably rhyme them off yourselves. Well, unless you're a guy, and in that case you might not really care.) She had little heel shoes that were a kind of pale icy pink, (I'm not that good at describing colors,) and had a bouquet of white tulips in one arm, and her hair was pulled back into a kind of lacy shroud-like headdress... it made me think of veils, though it didn't cover any of her face. Made her look all kinds of pretty and innocent and virginal, which I guess was the point. I decided right there and then that when we got to the 'you may kiss each other' part, I'd try to pull the lace away and let her hair tumble free - that was probably what Tess had had in mind too.

So she got up to the front and stood there beside me, and the minister smiled the kind of smile that - well, it wasn't an unpleasant expression, but it reminded me of how many times every day he must do this, and that the two of us were just, what, couple number six-hundred and forty three that week? "Good evening. We are gathered here tonight, in the presence of God and the State of Nevada, to witness and celebrate the joining of two lives into one, in the unity of marriage. These are solemn and sweet vows that you are about to take on, and they should not be spoken lightly. Do you both understand this?"

I paused, looked over at Tess, and all of my doubts seemed to fade away. Things might go wrong, I knew that there was no way to guarantee against that, but I wanted nothing more than to hold her close for the end of my days, and if we had to work hard at our relationship and go through hard times in order to get to that point... I felt like I was ready. "Yes, I do." Tess agreed, just a fraction of a second before I finished my own affirmation.

The minister looked at both of us a little more closely. "You kids have to both be at least eighteen before getting married here without parental approval - you realize that, right?"

"Yeah, we're both legal," I assured him. Both of us had our real IDs to prove that, I was pretty sure. Of course, Tess' legal age was a matter of some interpretation, but I wasn't going to bring that up of course.

"All right. Um, please join both hands and face each other." I did, enjoying the chance to look into Tess' bright blue eyes. "Kyle, will you take this woman, Tess, whose hands you hold, choosing her alone to be your beloved wife? Will you love her and comfort her, in sickness and health, through good times and bad? Will you be faithful to her, trust her, and honor her all the time?"

I paused a moment, totally calm, drinking in the vision of the girl I loved, wondering where the future would take us. "I do."

"Actually, it should be 'I will', but that's okay. Tess, will you take this man, Kyle, whose hands you hold, choosing him alone to be your beloved husband? Will you love him and comfort him, in sickness and health, through good times and bad? Will you be faithful to him, trust him, and honor him all the time?"

Tess looked back at me, and I think for a fraction of a second there was a shadow of uncertainty crossing her face, but that went away when she smiled. "Yes, I will."

The minister smiled and made little gestures for us to face him again. We did, though I kept holding Tess' hand in one of mine. "To love is to come together from the pathways of our past," he intoned somberly, "and then move forward...Hand in hand, along the uncharted roads of our future, ready to risk, to dream, and to dare... And always believe that all things are possible with faith and love in God, and in each other." Big breath. "Kyle, do you take Tess to be your wife, to love her and cherish her, from this day forward, and be true to her?"

"I do." Yep, **this** was the right spot for that cliched response, apparently.

"Tess, do you take Kyle to be your husband, to love him and cherish him, from this day forward, and be true to him?"

Tess took just a moment to peek cutely at me out of the corner of her eye. "I do."

"Have you the rings?"

Tess and I instantly burst into stifled laughter - we'd watched 'The princess Bride' together many times, and that line just sounded so reminiscent of the ludicrous sword-point marriage scene at the end, and the Impressive lisping clergyman. "Yeah, we do," I managed to say. Tess already had her blue-stone engagement ring on, (it wasn't anything actually very valuable, and she was okay with that, just wanted something pretty and fairly durable for the price.) The wedding bands were mostly plain silver, with little flattened discs inscribed, (flying saucers?) and our initials on them.

"Good. The wedding ring is a symbol of eternity, of the unbroken bond, of the circle of our lives, umm... and that kind of stuff." The minister looked like he had slightly fluffed the line. I didn't care - that sounded good. "I ask that these rings be blessed forevermore, to serve as a token of the covenant that the two of you have pledged, and that they will help to bring your lives peace, unity, love, and happiness. Kyle, repeat after me: With this ring..."

"'With this ring,'" I repeated, holding it out ready to slide over Tess' left ring finger, which was a little hard, since that arm was the one further from me. I repeated the other parts after the priest: "... I thee wed." (slide ring on. ) "Let it be a symbol of our love forever." I have to say, my throat caught a little at that part. Forever? Well... okay, cynical worst case scenario. Even if things didn't work out between us long term, this would be the wedding band for my first wedding... yeah, it would be a symbol for what I felt for Tess, and she for me, until the day that I died. Fair enough. Somehow, a small part of me was glad that he hadn't prompted me to ever say 'til death do us part'.

"Tess?" She put the ring on my finger, repeating the same formula, and didn't hesitate at all. "Kyle, Tess, since you have pledged your love to each other in this sacred place..." Tess snickered softly at that, "By the authority vested in me by the State and the powers of the Universe, I now proclaim you husband and wife. You may now kiss."

"Darn good thing," she whispered, as I turned and pulled the headdress away. Yeah - that was exactly what she wanted me to do at this point - I could tell it from the look in her eyes. And we leaned together and kissed... no French action, but a very sweet and soft kiss that fit the moment perfectly. The first time I kissed her as my wife. Wow... it'd take a while to get used to that thought.

"Thank you very much, Mister and Mrs Valenti," the minister said, smiling. "If you'll take the front side exit out of the chapel, we'll make sure that your license is all in order." Ahh, right. He wanted us to clear out so that the next couple could get started. Par for the course I guess. So we went to the little paperwork office next to the office - we'd filled out a form before, at the same time as Tess picked our package and I'd paid the fee, but this seemed to be no-kidding-around official government stuff.

We showed our ID - and I checked the driver's license that Tess passed over to make sure that it wasn't the one that said she was 21, just in case that might queer the whole deal. I really did want this marriage to be official, even if a small part of me wasn't sure that I was ready for it. And something else had occurred to me - something that I honestly hadn't thought of in these terms since that moment that Tess blurted out her ill-chosen 'consequence.' Now that we were married, and there wasn't an official reception or anything to go to - heck, our friends didn't even know about us getting hitched - then next would come the wedding night!

Yes, I admit it, I was looking forward to making love to Tess. I wouldn't have gone through with this whole wedding thing if that was the only point... hrm, but it's a nice little bit of icing on the wedding cake, as it were. (Not that we're getting a real wedding cake I guess.)

We went out into the lobby and met up with Wendy and Ryan again, and the four of us went across the corridor to a bar and drank toasts to each other, (though I made sure that Tess got _only_ ginger ale and didn't take a sip out of anyone else's drink this time,) and Wendy and Tess each tossed their bouquets into crowds to see who would catch them, and then ran up to take them back because they wanted to keep them. Finally, we said goodbye to them, and Tess and I rode back up in the elevator to our floor, and I gathered her up in my arms as she worked the lock, and we kissed long and hot as I carried her over the threshold.

"Ahem."

I looked up, and Tess turned to face into the room, which was more brightly lit than either of us had expected. More full, too. Max, Liz, Alex, and Isabel were all sitting around the edge of one bed. Michael and Maria were on the couch next to the coffee table. "Um, were we interrupting something?" Max asked in a low voice.

Tess quirked a delicate eyebrow and gestured with her feet. Belatedly I let her down into a standing position and she smoothed down her dress. "What the heck does it look like, Max? I'd say that you were interrupting something pretty private - wouldn't you?"

"You're... you're married?" Liz breathed softly, seeming stunned and almost personally betrayed by the idea. "Got married in Vegas?" What exactly was her problem, anyway? She couldn't be jealous of me - Liz was with Max now, and disgustingly happy with him, and whatever had happened between us had been long ago. And as far as Tess... well, I would certainly have thought that she'd be thrilled that I was taking Tess off the market, so that she and Max would almost definitely never be an item at all.

"Yes," I said, holding up my left hand and letting the marriage band speak for itself. "For about ten minutes now. Bit of an impulsive hearts kind of deal." Of course, that phrasing wouldn't mean anything to them unless they knew about that particular chapel, but... well, between the odd humiliation of having everybody staring at us like this, and the double bourbon on the rocks I'd had downstairs, I wasn't exactly at my most composed. "What the heck are all of you doing here?"

"Umm, we just kind of wanted to check in on you guys," Alex said, a sad look crossing over his face. "Since we'd hardly seen or heard a peep out of you in two days. If it was clear that you just wanted to have fun by yourselves, then I'd have voted to let you keep your privacy, but... well, I was worried that something weird might have been going on. Somebody threatening you or... or an alien mystery developing. Guess that wasn't the problem."

"No, mmm..." Tess looked down. "Sorry that we went all 'lost boys and girls' without telling you guys or whatever, but... it was kind of a spur of the heart thing." Suddenly I realized why this scene was familiar... some of the people were on the other side of the issue, but the basic issue was exactly the same as when we'd come up into the shared suite last time, and found my Dad waiting for us all pissed off. (Oh, god - Dad. Just what was he going to think about Tess and I getting hitched? Well, we'd storm that bridge when we came to it.) "And... sorry to say it, but it's been a kinduv long day and night, we're not in any life-threatening kind of trouble, and... um, hubby and me would really appreciate a little alone time right now. We'll meet you all for the breakfast buffet at nine-thirty tomorrow morning. Your hotel or ours?"

"Our hotel is also yours," Maria put in. "At least, there are beds there for you - not that they've been slept in."

"_Our_ hotel," Max said firmly. "We'll see you then." He got up, a little uncertainly, and went up to kiss Tess on the cheek. "Best wishes." He sighed slightly. "You might just need them." And with that sidelong shot at me, he led an exodus out of the room. Liz followed him without saying anything to us.

Alex whispered something to me on his way: 'I would've liked an invite.' That kinda made me feel like a first-class heel for the whole thing. Tess got all kinds of attention and stuff from the rest of the group - Isabel hugged her, Michael congratulated her - which made Maria slap him hard on the side. When Michael asked what he'd done now, Maria went into a big spiel about how it was all kinds of uncooth to congratulate a bride on her wedding day, because it implied that she was luckier than she deserved to get married, or because it suggested that she'd had to go out and catch a man.

"But it's okay to congratulate the groom?"

"Well, in this case, yes." Maria giggled. Apparently, I was going to get no end of abuse for this. I didn't care. Finally they all left and it was just the two of us. I turned to look at Tess. "Well, apparently the honeymoon's over already."

She smiled, her eyes glinting softly, and pushed me onto the bed. "Not quite _yet_ I hope!"

"Ooh." I was suddenly conflicted. "Umm... sorry, can we use the other bed?" Tess seemed to be a bit confused by the request. "This is the one that everybody else was sitting and waiting for us on."

Tess shook her head in mild exasperation, (which made her curly hair glint with hidden wonders of gold,) but we recreated the same position over on the other bed. Tess waved a hand, and all of the lights went out except for one, which dimmed to a suitably romantic level. Suddenly I wished that we had thought to get some candles - I bet that Tess would have really liked that touch. But it didn't seem worth the effort to stop for that now. Especially now that, well... Tess made some kind of odd and complicated gesture at herself with both hands, closing her eyes - as if she were an enchantress casting a spell... (Hmm, maybe that's how she managed to steal my heart.)

Her white gown fuzzed, its outlines becoming indistinct, and then she was just clothed in a white puffy cloud, which streamed off towards the chair next to the window, and then resumed the shape of a white dress, folded over the back of the chair. I blinked in susprise, struck by what she must have done - reduced the dress to its component atoms, moved those atoms, and then re-constituted it. Oh, well, the view that was left now that the dress was not actually being worn any more was also something that I was struck by.

Tess' underwear was pure white, and lacy, and kinduv more involved than anything I'd ever seen on a girl before. (Of course, this wasn't just any girl now - she was my wife. Still can't quite wrap my head around that one.) Bustier top, seperate garter belt and stockings... the overall effect was definitely impressive and dangerously sexy. (I was already hard as a steel pole inside my suit pants, and reaching mentally for some baseball facts - not that I needed them just yet, but if she tried to tease me very much more before we got to the real deal, well...) She leaned over just enough to give me a hint of a further cleavage shot. "Should we take these off the same way as the dress, or use a more old-fashioned approach?"

Thought about that for a second. "I don't really feel like being old fashioned," I admitted. "At least, not when it comes to this. Umm... can you try doing me that way? I'm curious about what it feels like."

She didn't wave her hands or close her eyes that time... just kind of stared at me and maybe muttered under her breath, which again was not something that Tess usually did when exercising her powers, but I didn't really care. Suddenly... there was an odd sensation of getting dumped into water that was freezing cold and incredibly hot at the same time, and... and everything that I'd been wearing burst away in several directions, leaving me completely naked there on the bed, my state of readiness suddenly impossible to hide.

Tess smiled, but didn't giggle or laugh at my predicament... in fact, she seemed to grow more excited herself at the prospect of what my stiff and thick tool meant. Well, that was good. I was certainly feeling eager enough to... well, I first thought 'to use it on her', but that doesn't really seem the right turn of phrase in this moment. Too stereotypically underage male, too crude. If I could bring the girl I loved pleasure, (and get some sexual satisfaction myself at the same time,) that was well and good, but I didn't feel the need to be too direct about that, even in my thoughts. I was Tess' husband now, and we were about to consummate our love, that is if she would ever quit playing games and get to the point.

Tess got rid of the bustier the same way, (except that it didn't look like a cloud so much as a faint wisp of mist, probably because it was smaller, and her garter belt, stockings, and shoes at the same time. (I had to bite my lip to _not_ tell her to put the shoes on again... time enough to play out fantasies like that later.)

Then she crawled onto the bed, her torso upright, her legs bent at the knees, and I stared up and down at the seamless perfection of her body. Breasts that were full and soft without getting too huge and massive, just perfectly upright and perky, sweet and delicious looking nipples, a gently curving pale stomach, tidily flared hips, smooth and luscious legs. Our lips met in an explosive kiss, me rising to meet Tess as she fell down against my chest, (which was just enough of an impact to force me back flat,) and hands wandering everywhere in an incindiary flare of passion. Soon Tess was licking at my chest, which I knew was something that she loved, but... "Come on, I'm nearly ready to explode, my darling wife," I said. "Are... are you ready to really go at it?"

"Hmm." Tess considered. "Let's see." She sat up, kind of straddling me, and held up her hand. Something winged into it from somebody's bag - a little wrapped condom. "Put it on. I can't go on human hormones, and I'm _not_ going to become a married, teenage mother."

"Ohh." Fair enough, I supposed. Actually, Tess helped me put it on, with a few cues. I've always found that that's easier, partly just because anybody else but a guy can get their head and arms closer to his crotch, and partly because a woman's fingers can keep me, umm, stiff and straight better, which is the best way to make sure that a rubber is on snugly. "Anything else, dear?"

"Yeah." She turned over and lay back on the other side of the bed. "If' you're so racing to go, then you can make sure I'm there too. You're really hot, but I don't think I go without more foreplay than this."

"Works for me," I said. Between last year, and the past two days, I had learned quite a lot of what turned Tess on, what made her hungry for more, and I used every little trick in the book as quickly as possible. Even so, I was still a little worried about going prematurely, considering that the tricks in the book involved my hands and mouth on Tess' supple bosom, her belly button, her short but perfect thighs, and a few places that were even more exciting. Finally she waved me off - or maybe waved me in. "Do... do you want me to be on the top?" I asked, feeling a little uncertain about it.

"Umm... yeah, err, I dunno," she mumbled. "Why? Does it... does it make a difference?"

"Well, not for me personally," I said. "It's you - I'm going to love it just about anyway. But - well, this is your first time, and I've heard that it's less painful and easier to get off if the girl's on top the first few times."

Tess shrugged. "Okay, works for me." She spun around again, having grabbed me by the arms and wrapped her legs around mine so that I ended up beneath her. Working her groin against my hips for a moment before getting right into position, she bent down far enough to kiss me - and for a long moment, I wasn't in the hotel room. Instead, I was sitting on a folding chair, outside a summer cabin high up on a hill. Tess... Tess was coming up a path towards me, but she wasn't quite like the Tess I was really familiar with. She seemed... older and a bit more elegant. Still pretty short and fresh-faced, but maybe thirty years old, and carrying a little baby in her arms with brown hair like mine and wearing a pink jumper. Right then, **whoosh**, two little rugrats, maybe three or four years old, rush past, one in front of me and one behind, nearly knocking my chair over. The one I got a good look at had straw-colored hair nearly like Tess', a cute little guy.

"Boys, how many times have I told you not to roughhouse like that around your father," Tess called out with a wink. "You'll set him a bad example!" I shook my head and frowned, but the frown didn't last as my wife reached me and bent down to kiss me on the lips. She was wearing a soft, comfy flannel shirt, and I could feel the edge of one breast pushing against my upper arm through it. And then... back into the hotel room.

"Wow," I muttered, and I realized that Tess was looking at me with a surprised expression too. "Did... did you see something from our future together too?"

"Y-yeah," she breathed. "Or maybe just something I want to be in our future. You, me. A cozy little apartment, somewhere with snow falling outside the windows. It... it was our son's first christmas, and he was playing with wrapping paper instead of the toys we'd bought him."

I laughed. "Sure you want to wait, what, seven years before we meet him?" I teased her.

"At least three," she countered. "Probably five. But that doesn't mean that we can't... " and she wriggled around a little. "Practice a little."

"Oh, practicing sounds like a _very_ good idea," I managed to gasp out. And that's when she started to do it... or maybe I should say we started to do it together.

No, I'm not describing any more of this scene. Come on, you perverts! That's my wife you're talking about, now!


	4. Chapter 4

Okay, so the next day I woke up in bed with the gloriously soft sensation of my alien wife Tess pressing close next to me. A number of interesting thoughts struck me in quick succession. Let's see how well I can list them out.

1) Man, that was the hottest sex I've ever fantasized about.

1b) Especially the third time.

2) I certainly never expected to get married when I came to Vegas.

2b) Can't say that I'm sorry it happened though.

2c) Though Tess and I have a lot of stuff to work out about our future, I guess

2d) Hope that we don't get into a fight about that future stuff

2e) Maybe if we fight, there'll be some good makeup sex - see (1)

3) Gee, my head kinda hurts.

3b) Oh, great, hangover. How much booze did I drink after we walked down the aisle, anyway? How long ago was it I had the Texas Tea? I can't remember.

3c) What was that hangover remedy that Malamud used to swear by? Equal parts gatorade, coke, and... beer? Can that be right?

4) Gut check time. You just woke up in Las Vegas, with a hangover, and remembered you got married last night. To an alien girl. A gorgeously hot, alien girl with a temper to match, far from low-maintenance, and a girl who you have tons of awkward history and baggage with. Shouldn't you be freaking out?

4b) No, it sounds weird, but I'm really not. I don't want to, and I don't think I'm going to.

5) Boy, Tess looks really cute and adorable when she's sleeping like this...

Right then, my mental ramblings were cut off when Tess' eyes popped open, and she shrieked out loud in dismay, which just nicely managed to puncture all of the sweeter and fluffier things I had been thinking about her and how happy I was about what had happened. I turned toward her, not getting too close until the shriek was done, and tried to make a soothing, comforting sound. Not sure how well I did with that, but as soon as Tess caught sight of my face, she clamped her mouth closed and the terrified,.bug-eyed look on her face got a bit less pronounced. Probably she realized how much her reaction was upsetting me and didn't really want to make anything worse develop. "Oh - okay, that's not exactly the reaction that any guy wants to get the morning after his wedding night, I have to admit that," I said to her.

"I... I'm sorry, Kyle," Tess muttered. "I... I just had a kinda disorienting moment of... of remembering what had happened, and not being sure how drunk I was when we... when all of the wedding stuff happened, and doubting if we were ready for any of this or if we're even legally sane for going through with it... and then I freaked out."

"Hmm..." I considered this. "When - umm, when you put it that way, it actually doesn't sound too unreasonable. I... I can wish that you'd picked a slightly less annoying way to express your freakedness," I sighed, and Tess closed her eyes, shaking her head back and forth slightly as if mentally telling herself off for screaming, "and I can't help but wonder how soundproof the walls are in this hotel..."

Just at that moment, as if to prove my point there was a banging on my door. "Hey, lady!" somebody called in a slightly deep, but nasal voice, which sounded like it'd have been good on a sixties sitcom. "Everything alright in there? You're not getting killed or raped or something, is yah?"

Tess snickered slightly at the phrasing of the question. "No, umm, no immediate threat to life or... or limb or anything like that," Tess replied, obviously not quite sure what the equivalent should be for a rape. 'Virtue' was way too old-fashioned for her... and in some sense, her virtue had indeed been compromised last night, though it hadn't been a rape because she'd wanted it at the time. (Or was a wedding vow over the bed an automatic safety seal on a girl's virtue, or something like that? I wasn't sure about the details of Victorian morality or whatever.) "Just... just woke up and remembered who I got married to last night."

"Oh, _that_," Deep and Nasal replied with a nasal laugh. "Well, I guess that happens a lot around here, but please, could you keep it down? There's a place to get divorces downstairs somewhere I think."

"Hmm," I remarked as faint footsteps indicated that Mister nasal was heading away from our door - probably back to his own room. "I guess that the laws of supply and demand would require those in Vegas too."

"Actually, I think that Vegas divorces are an attraction even for people who didn't get married here too," Tess pointed out. "For similar reason to weddings... no waiting period and little paperwork. If you and your ball-n-chain want to cut loose without having to worry about waiting eight weeks for the state to grant permission, then you can just head to Vegas."

"Hmm... yeah, I've heard something about that," I commented. "Don't think it's **quite** as easy as all that, but who knows." Big sigh. "Tess... do you **want** to get a divorce?"

"Umm... oh, god, I don't know," she said. "Should... should I take it from the way you've been reacting that you don't?"

"Err, no," I replied. "I... I love being married to you, Tess - well, it hasn't been that long and probably hasn't given me the best indication of how things will go, but - but I _**want**_ to be married to you, and... and to find out what it'll be like. I love the idea, and I... I have no second thoughts or hesitation about continuing with this." Beat. "Well, maybe I have a **little** bit of hesitation, but I'm not letting it overwhelm everything else that I think and feel."

"I... I really don't know what to do," Tess complained. "If... if I wanted you to give up USC to be with me, because we were married... what - what would you say?"

"Oh, Buddha on a bicycle," I swore before I could stop myself. "It... it's a huge scholarship to give up, sweetie. And... and Dad's signed off on the play or pay clause, and I've had to give up all of the other potential scholarships because I said that I was committed to USC, and..." I trailed off. Tess' blue eyes were holding my gaze in an unbreakable way, like there was an alien stun field beaming out of them. (That reminded me of the first big conversation that we'd had after she moved into the house, where she'd joked about hitting me with her 'death ray eyes.') "But... but if you asked, and it was what it took to get this marriage working, then yes, I'd tell Dad that I was pulling out, and then I'd go through with it. He'd... he'd probably throw me out of the house for it, and I'd need to find some way of paying him back eventually, but.."

"Okay then," Tess replied, holding up a hand to keep me from going on any longer. "I... I'm **not** asking that of you just yet. Just... just wanted to hear what you thought... as a way of measuring just how serious you are about this stuff, I guess."

"Oh." For a second I was a little upset at the hypothetical question - I've never been wild about girls who play mental games. But then, well, I tried to look at things from her point of view for a second, and it kinduv made sense that she'd need to know. "_Very_ serious," I added inanely, though what I was saying now probably couldn't possibly add anything to what I'd demonstrated. "So - umm, what do we do now?"

Tess considered, and then forced a half-smile onto her face. "Well... we go and meet the gang for breakfast - I think something was said about breakfast buffet?"

"Hmm." I considered that. "Well, we're not supposed to meet up with them until nine thirty... and that's nearly two hours away," I pointed out. "Probably would be a good idea to shower and change first. And... and maybe check out? I... I know that Evans would love for us to go back and join them at the House of mediocrity."

"Ohhh..." Tess exclaimed. "No, come on. For... for better or worse, we're married, and this is our honeymoon suite! We... we won't be able to share a room back there at the other place, not unless one of us switches rooms with one of Alex and Isabel, and... and I wouldn't want to ask them to do that if they don't want to." She sighed. "We'll be able to come back and check out before noon, after breakfast... if things work out somehow, but we're not doing it first." She looked around. "I suppose that we could gather up our stuff a little and pack, just in case."

"Hmm..." I smiled. Tess might be running hot and cold about this marriage thing, but that was better than getting an entirely cold shoulder. It also seemed quite in character with her... threaten to take away one of the perks of her bridal state, and she fought harder for it - and to a certain limited extent, for our marriage itself. This could be useful. Now, exactly when should I mention the possibility of wedding presents for best persuasive effect?

"So, let's see," Tess said, sitting up and wrapping the sheet around her, in a prim way that seemed exactly out of a PG-13 movie. "Showering. Are you going to make a pitch in favor of using the facilities together again, or will you let me go first?"

"Ohh," I replied. Let's see... hot sexy shower would _definitely_ be nice, but... but something about the way Tess had said that told me that I'd need to expend an awful lot of persuasive talent to get her to go along with it enough to be worthwhile... and maybe it'd be better to save what mojo I had for a later occasion. Oh, well. "Umm... I won't argue for the showering together unless **you** really want to." Possible side benefit - if Tess did want to shower together and was expecting to have me pleading and working hard for it, now I'd turned things around and told her that she had to ask for it. "But I don't think you should automatically get first dibs either."

"Hmm." Tess considered that. "That's fair. Flip a coin for it?"

Aww. Either she was playing hard to get too, or she just didn't really care about the shower lovin'. I looked around to see where my pants and my wallet had ended up, and landed on the bedside table next to me, which had a nickel sitting on it. Hmm... I didn't remember either of us putting a coin there, especially not such a small denomination. Oh well. I reached out and picked it up. "Call it in the air, and no fair using your powers," I warned, balancing the tails side on my curved right index finger for just a second and then flipping it into the air above the bed with a smooth motion of the thumb. It glittered slightly as it rose and started to fall.

"Ummm - tails never fails," Tess blurted out, and I couldn't help but smile at the old catchphrase, which had made the rounds in my fifth-grade class. Where had Tess been when she first heard that one? The coin landed flat on the mattress between us - heads up. "Dammit!"

"Don't worry,darling," I said, and leaned over to give her a kiss on the cheek, which she tolerated with fairly good grace. "I'll be sure to leave you plenty of hot water."

"Umm... if you could use up all of the hot water in a hotel this fancy," Tess pointed out, "I would be seriously, seriously worried. Just don't take too long!" She had a point about not being able to use up the water, I guessed. How fancy a water system would a place like this need to have, I wondered? You'd need to accommodate - um, several thousand people, in couples, families, or by themselves - and most of them would want a morning shower or hot bath at around the same time in the morning, I supposed. For anybody to be unable to get one would result in loud complaining, bad word-of-mouth, possibly losing the customer and numerous friends and family to a different place in terms of all future business. They'd have worked out the system so it had a bunch of extra capacity, I guessed.

I made a point of going into the shower and getting out again in less than ten minutes, though I could easily have stayed in for three times as long and enjoyed myself immensely. No time like the very start to impress on Tess that I was capable of being a considerate... husband. (The term still seemed a bit weird to apply to myself.) I hurried out of the bathroom as soon as I was mostly dried off, and Tess hurried right on in after me. I got dressed in something that looked pretty nice and formal - a black sport coat and pants, a pastel-green shirt... (Tess mentioned while shopping for my matrimonial stuff yesterday that she likes the way green accents my eyes.) Did a bit of tidying and packing, making sure that we could get checked out in a hurry just in case, and then, for lack of anything more interesting to do, turned on the room TV and started watching cartoons. Caught about half of a really good Pinky and the Brain episode, and then some Futurama, which I've never thought of as a morning cartoon show, but it was good anyway. Tess was in the bathroom for nearly half an hour herself, with little bits of steam and odd aromas floating out every so often. When she finally emerged, she was wearing a whisp of pink nightie that I hadn't noticed her take into the bathroom, (though she could probably have balled it up and carried it in her hand without my spotting that,) and started looking for more clothes of her own, which kinda dragged my attention away from the fearless crew of the _Planet Express_. (Yeah, even Leela and Amy Wong. Of course, the fact that Tess isn't a cartoon more or less worked in her favor there.)

Soon Tess was dressed up and looking gorgeous - wearing a dark purple-blue dress that went down nearly to her knees and covered up a lot of skin... but when you looked a little closer you noticed that the fabric was tightly defining everything that it pretended to conceal. (Or at least that's what **I** noticed.) Her hair was so fluffed, waved, and pumped that it was nearly too much of a good thing, and - well, I'll just say that she looked some kind of awesome. "Okay, we've still got a while before breakfast," I said, "and we're a little bit too dressed up to spend it here in the room. So what?"

Tess considered that for a moment. "We go down to the lobby, get some coffee or other beverages - and take a little walk? Away from the strip a bit, get out of whatever noise and confusion Vegas still has to offer at this time of the morning?" She shrugged, as if she felt awkward about that suggestion. "No - no matter how much time we've spent together over the last year and a half... or the last two days, I - I still feel like I don't know you well enough to be married to you. That's probably silly of me, and even if it were true, it's not like we can really share enough walking around between now and nine thirty to make that much of a difference... but I dunno, maybe it'll help. Are you up for..."

"Coffee good," I told her. "Walking good. Talking with you - is _really_ good." Tess laughed, and she grabbed a purse, and I checked to make sure that I had my wallet in the right pair of pants, (as in the pair of pants that I was currently wearing,) and that it had the room keycard carefully hidden in the credit card pockets, behind my student ID card. Stepped out of the room, rode down on the elevator with three loud and rowdy little boys and their somewhat embarrassed older sister, who was maybe twelve years old with mid-brown hair. She looked at us after the pains-in-her-butt had gotten off, and looked like she was about to ask a question, but didn't. Oh well.

I got a grande cappuccino at the Starbucks express in the lobby, and Tess surprised me slightly by taking a Darjeeling tea with milk and two sugar cubes. (I know that she drinks tea every so often, but since she was the one who mentioned coffee, I thought that she'd take something in the coffee family.) There was already a fairly large crowd out on the strip, whether they were already casino crawling or maybe breakfast buffet crawling, or whatever; I wasn't sure. Tess led the way to a cross street and sighed once we were half a block down it, as if she could finally hear herself think. Maybe she could - though I wouldn't have thought her alien senses had gotten to the point where crowds were really such of a problem for her. "Okay, umm... now I have absolutely no idea what to start talking about," she admitted with a cute pout, and drank a bit of her tea.

"Well, as it just happens, I have a possible ice breaker," I told her. "'Tails never fails.' When was the first time you ever used that - and did you have better luck with it than you did this morning?"

"Umm... oh boy, I'm not sure if I can really remember," Tess admitted uncertainly.

"I'll take an approximation, then," I said. "The first one that you **can** recall pretty well, if there's one."

She smiled, looking around at everything that was around us. We were coming up on a cross street now, and Tess led the way across, instead of turning at the corner, still somewhat sunk in thought. "Okay, umm... probably when I was in Brownie scouts, when I was - ohh, eight or nine. You know."

Of course, there was always the usual vagueness about ages when it came to Tess and the rest of the 'pod squad' - but I did know what she meant. She was the right apparent age to fit in with other eight and nine year olds. "Hmm... okay, so was this when you were still in Philadelphia, or after you'd moved, to - umm, no, don't tell me. To - Virginia?"

"West Virginia," Tess corrected, but with a bit of a smile on her face that I'd been able to work it out that far. "Little place called Spencer in West Virginia. I... I'm not sure if Ed had any particular reason for bringing us there. Maybe he'd just gotten into some kind of trouble off in Philly, and figured that going somewhere that nobody would expect to look for us would help."

"Hmm..." I considered that. "What what was he doing for work then? Was he with the Army already, or..."

"I - I think he started with them when we were in Spencer - so that's another reason, maybe," she admitted. "Trying to build up that cover identity, figuring that it could be useful as long as he found out a way to transfer himself to somewhere when it was really important - like when we came back to Roswell in the first place." She sighed.

"Anyway, Spencer was a pretty dull place, even counting the Army base just outside town. The Girl Scouting stuff was really important, so it was nearly required that I join the Brownies, but it was pretty fun. Flipping coins was a major pastime among the Brownie scouts." She sighed. "Kendra... no, Kenda Smithers, she challenged me to one flip, with our diaries on the line. I called tails never fails, and I **didn't** try to use my powers on the flip, but tails carried me through." She sighed. "That diary... actually helped me out a bit over the next few years, getting a glimpse into the private life of an ordinary human girl."

"Wow," I breathed, not quite sure what to make of all that. "Your own diary... you didn't put anything about Ed or the alien stuff in it, did you?"

"No, of course, I wouldn't have been that stupid," Tess agreed. "But... but it was still - umm, there were some things I was very nervous about other girls seeing, because I thought that they'd be able to see I didn't have the same notion of what a diary was for as they did. Actually, I think mine was closer to Kenda's than I would ever have expected." She sighed. "Even back then... the alienation I felt from the world wasn't as strange as I told myself it was."

"Every nine-year old kid feels alienated in some way, I guess," I decided.

"Oh, and what were your issues when you were nine?" Tess asked, and then thought about that a second. "Oh, right, I guess most of them probably centered on having lost your mom, right?"

"Yeah, I guess so," I admitted. "She'd... she'd been the center of my world, and then I had to go and try to put everything back together without her, and for a long time I was doing about as well as all the king's horses were on Humpty Dumpty." Tess snickered... she always found that part of the nursery rhyme _really_ weird, well, I guess a lot of us found it weird that the horses were assigned to help put an egg back together, but Tess said she used to puzzle over that as if she thought it made sense to everybody else but her. "I... I guess that's part of why I'm reacting this way to... to the situation we've found ourselves in," Tess looked up at me in surprise. "I... I know that we don't have kids yet, but - but I know what it's like for a marriage to end in divorce, and I don't want that to happen to either of us. That... that might be a silly reason to stick with a marriage that started in a Vegas wedding chapel named 'Impulsive Hearts', but... but come on, Tess! Yes, we were impulsive, but you didn't seem drunk or that far out of your sound mind yesterday, and this was _your_ idea. You... you practically dared me into it!"

"Are, are you trying to say that I have to..."

"You don't have to anything," I quickly put in. "Just... I thought that you loved me, and you wanted to go through with this. And... and the sex was great, and we had good flashes, right?" Tess nodded slightly. "So - so what happened from then until when you woke up that made everything so much less certain?"

"It... it was never stable in the first place," Tess answered, and I could see tears forming in her eyes. "We... we were just excited enough yesterday that we weren't looking at the real world, neither of us. Just staring at our future through rose colored glasses." I sighed a bit and kept on walking. "But... but I **do** love you, Kyle. That's the only - oh, I don't know what I'm saying." She let out a quiet sob, and without thinking about it I pulled her into a tight hug. She sighed slightly and nestled into my arms as if that made it all better. If only things were quite that easy.

"It's... it's okay, my darling my dear," I whispered. "Somehow... someway we'll sort it all out."

#

We kept walking around for quite a while - I kept my arm around Tess' shoulders even after she'd calmed down and showed no signs of further crying, and she put one of her own hands over on the far side of my waist, and that almost made it feel as if we were a regular couple. Chatted more about stuff from our childhood... how I pushed myself into athletics because it was the only field in which Dad and I seemed to really connect well, where I felt I could excel. Tess' struggles to find an identity for herself when Ed would only ever give her occasional hints about who she really was and where she had come from, and how he'd trained her to be self-sufficient and self-reliant long before most human kids were used to being alone without babysitters.

We strolled into the lobby of the second-rate hotel pretty much right at nine twenty-nine and thirty seconds, and took about twenty-five seconds to find the buffet. Isabel and Alex, Michael and Maria were all sitting at a table, with four other seats there. "So, what about Max and Liz?" I asked. "They up in their room canoodling still?"

"Nah," Michael drawled slightly. "They're standing in line already." Tess sighed slightly and picked a chair next to Isabel, so I went over to the next seat around. "You two still man and wife?"

Tess shot a frustrated look at Michael. She's never much liked being made fun of. "Definitely." And, as if it needed to be proved, she planted a big kiss onto my face. (Even if she was just doing it to prove a point, I couldn't bring myself to mind.) "Any other questions?"

"Well - umm, if you're really serious about that, I think I'd like to hear the story," Isabel said.

"Well... okay." Being the center of attention and telling stories... now those would have to go into the 'like' column for Tess Harding... or should it be - no, I **really** shouldn't start calling her Tess Valenti, even in my head, before she says that she wants people to use that name. _Definitely_ not. Could lead to all kinds of badness. "Umm, well, we were wandering around the lobby, and caught sight of the wedding chapel, and just blurted out... oh, I guess I need to tell you something about the way I got the three consequences in the first place." She looked at me, trying to weigh how much detail to go into, about the alcohol and the sex-play in our room and all of that kind of stuff.

"It... well, it was kinduv an exchange of favors," I suggested. "I... I wanted Tess to do something big to help me out, and... and she asked for three unspecified consequences in exchange." Looked over at her. "Umm, don't think we really need to include more about that as part of the story."

Isabel's eyes were a little wider open than usual, but Tess nodded and continued. "Well, I said that his third consequence was to marry me, and then took it back. Not... not quite sure what went through my mind when I did, but..."

"Hey." Someone had tapped me on the shoulder, and I looked up and realized it was Alex. "They'll be at this for a while. Wanna hit the line?"

"Mmmm." I thought about it. Letting Tess tell the story by herself - well, there would certainly be parts of it that I'd want to correct her on, but maybe it was smarter to get myself out of the area for a while and thus block out the temptation, since she probably won't like getting a conflicting source of testimony to interfere. Besides, what did it really matter if Isabel and Maria heard the 'she said' part? There was probably no way to keep that from happening sooner or later, if the girls wanted to discuss it. "Alright, cool."

So we got up and waited for the big hot-foods smorgashboard, (or whatever you call it,) and Michael got up and waited behind Alex. "I... I certainly would never have thought of you as being the first one of us to up and get hitched, Valenti, man," Michael remarked. "Starting to panic yet?"

"Umm..." I turned about, looked at Tess, still talking animatedly to Isabel and Maria, and to Max and Liz who had just shown up with their plates. Smiled peacefully. "No, frankly I think it was one of the smartest things I've ever done in my life, and I just hope... hope that Tess will stick it out with me instead of dumping me on my ass and serving divorce papers."

"Really?" Alex asked. "But... but she seems so confident - and it was her idea." We all stepped a spot forward in line.

"Even so." Sighed, and realized that I didn't feel any nervousness about confiding into the guys - even Michael Guerin - about this. "The confidence is a sham, I think - she doesn't want you guys to tease her about getting foolishly married in Vegas, so she pretends that everything is under control, that she's fine with this and is happy with me. But the reality... is not there yet, as much as I might wish it so."

"Hmmm..." Alex considered that. "Well, if there's _anything_ that we can do to help with the deep issues, then just let me know, 'kay?"

"Umm, alright." I sighed and turned to the buffet. Great stuff. I got a few blueberry pancakes and maple bacon before I suddenly realized that I could score major brownie points by bringing Tess back a plate full of all of the stuff that she'd like best. But... but what to do with all of the stuff I'd already taken? It wouldn't fit with Tess', and I couldn't dump it or put it back without getting told off... there were 'take all you like but eat all you take' signs. Hmm. "Okay, little thing, but there's something you can do for the cause, Whitman."

"What, already?"

"Yeah," I laughed. "Once I'm done, take my plate back, and don't let m'darling bride get up and wait in line herself. I'm going to go through again and collect a pile of treats for her."

Alex grinned. "Now that's using yer noggin, jocko." I looked up in surprise, but obviously he didn't mean any particular insult by that line, so I let it go. Took a few sausage patties, sliced and toasted a big thick piece of homestyle bread for myself, and added a few little sticks of mozarella cheese. Yeah, that should do for the first helping. The pot of oatmeal porridge smelled very appetizing, but it wouldn't fit with all the stuff I had already, and there'd certainly still be some when I went back for my seconds. I'd bet on that. So I passed off that plate to Alex, and turned back to the table, suddenly worried that Tess would have already joined the line. No, she hadn't, although Maria was just stepping up, and I ended up behind her.

"Wait a second, Kyle, what are you do... oh." She smiled. "Got a plate for the wifey first, and now going through for yourself?"

"Umm... the other way around, actually," I said, feeling foolish about it. "Only because I already had some me stuff on a plate before I thought about getting anything for her."

Maria considered that. "Well... the fact that you thought of doing it at all counts for something, I guess." A little bit punctured, I didn't say any more, and Tess turned around and waited silently herself.

"Hmm..." Tess said as I sat down, calmly evaluating the fruits of my labors that I set down in front of her. "Two really big belgian waffles... little bit of ham, and two eggs, over easy." She bent over and kissed the side of my face. "Great, darling, except that there's no..." I slipped a bottle of Tabasco out of my pocket and put it next to her glass of grapefruit juice. "Oh, my, you've thought of everything."

"Definitely a keeper, Tess," Isabel remarked, without any trace of irony. "Ooh, and here comes mine." Sure enough, Alex was walking towards the table with a second plate of his own for Isabel. Of course, Whitman would follow up on my idea - it was right up his alley, after all.

I turned back to my own plate - and immediately noticed something wrong with it. "Hey! Something's missing here. More than one thing, already!" The bacon was gone without a trace, and one of the pancakes had also vanished. Liz giggled slightly, and that was enough to confirm my suspicions. "Tess, dear darling? Did you swipe some of my breakfast while I was off getting yours?"

"Umm... yes," she admitted. "I... I'm sorry, but - well, I was hungry waiting here, and - and there's plenty of food for both of us." She sighed, finished anointing her plateful with the Tabasco sauce and put a forkful to her lips. "You - um, you can help yourself to anything on my plate - erm, if it's not too hot for you, or - or I'll go in a minute and get something for _you_!"

I thought about that. It was weird how everything that happened was quickly getting evaluated first in terms of what its effect might be on our shaky brand-new marriage. Every decision that I made was filtered through that one overriding imperative of winning Tess over so that she would want to stay my wife. Generally, if we'd gotten married on better terms, I might have argued that it was a man's place to bring back the bacon, (in more than one sense of the word,) and insist that she sit there and let me wait on her. But... but as odd as it sounded, letting her do this thing for me, if she really wanted to - might prove more helpful. "Well, I'm not insisting on it," I said with a fond smile. "You... you don't have anything to make up to me, nobody's keeping score. But if you'd like to get me something, who am I to argue with it?"

"Okay," Tess replied. "But we've both got stuff to eat first. Do you want anything sweet to put on those pancakes?" There were a bunch of condiments and syrups at the table, presumably for just this sort of thing - in case people didn't want to apply them up at the buffet or didn't think of it.

"Umm, yeah, anything with a decent quantity of actual maple syrup?" I asked. Tess started to look at different bottles.

"Oh, we've been through this already," Max realized, looking up from whatever private conversation he'd been having with his Liz-ikins. "No pure maple syrup, but this stuff is half maple and half corn..." he picked up a fancy glass jar with a narrow plastic top nozzle that didn't really seem to match, "and it's pretty good I think." I tried drizzling the thick brown syrup over my two remaining pancakes, cut off a piece of one of them, and smiled. The bread and cheese seemed a bit weird to eat without anything meaty, and I tried some of Tess' ham, decided that I didn't like it that much all tabasco-ed up... and then rediscovered the sausage patties, which had somehow gotten underneath my very last pancake.

"Okay, so, what about a wedding reception?" Maria asked. "Do... do we have to wait until we're back in Roswell for that, or..."

"Ohh..." Tess drawled, looking over at me. "Umm, I kinda figured that _this_ was our wedding reception. It's all on us, of coruse." She took another bite of ice cream covered waffle. "Make sure to try the omelette bar."

It was hard to judge the reaction to that. Maria didn't seem particularly satisfied, but maybe she'd been looking forward to a fancier party. "Do... do the happy couple usually pay for the reception?" I asked Tess.

"Well... most often it's the parents of the bride I guess," Tess stage-whispered back. "But hey - orphan. No parents that are here on this planet, at least. Kind of rules that out. And it's not like we're low on funds."

That last part, probably, she should have actual-whispered instead of just stage-whispered. "Rolling in dough, Tess?" Max hissed back, suddenly looking very annoyed again. "Have you guys been cheating at the tables?"

"Haven't you?" Tess replied sassily. "Isn't that part of the fun of being an alien in Vegas?"

"Naw, neither of the Evanses have unwound enough to use their powers, as far as I can tell," Michael commented. "I've been doing a pretty good job of keeping under the radar myself, and not..."

"Can we **please** not talk about you-know-what right here?" Liz asked. "Somebody's going to forget and raise their voices - I can just tell."

Well, that put a damper on the whole conversation, something that Liz Parker, bless her great big thumpin' heart, is actually better at than I'd usually like to admit. Tess and I finished our plates, and she repeated her intent to go and get me my seconds. I gave her a kiss thank-you on the lips, mostly because it was a good excuse. Looked into her eyes as she smiled afterward - I was still finding it a little hard to tell, but I think she was feeling honestly pleased and not just putting on a show in front of the rest of the gang.

"Okay, well, we've still got several days left, and I have to say, I'm feeling a little bored with just the casino and lounge acts stuff," Michael admitted. "Is there something a bit more active that we can do while we're here?"

"Hold the phone - Michael Guerin tired of gambling?" Max teased him.

"Well, we could probably take a tour bus out to Hoover Dam," I mentioned, remembering the little girls I'd seen when I was streaking yesterday. "Not sure that'd be less boring that getting your teeth cleaned, though."

"There's got to be other alternatives," Liz insisted, smiling. "An Elvis museum or something."

"I think I'm really in the mood for an amusement park, if there's anything like that near here," Alex decided. There was a good deal of agreement to this remark.

"Oh, somebody has to have thought of that," Isabel decided. "It's an obvious answer to 'what to have the babysitter do with the kids while you're gambling away their house?'"

"Hmm... of course, that answer still leaves the kids without a house after they come back from the park," Maria pointed out, "but yeah. I think there's a punch of pamphlets and attractions guides out near the check-in desk." She smiled. "Assuming we can find a decent park - will the bride and groom be joining us?"

I looked at Tess, except she wasn't there next to me of course, and it took a moment to find her, nearly at the head of the queue for the omelet bar. Just then she looked at me and smiled, and I waved back. This sounded like a perfect way to recapture the romance and impulsiveness that we had both been feeling just yesterday. "Yeah, have to ask the Missus, but sounds good."

"How quickly even the most strong-willed and feckless of us become whipped once that wedding band is on," Michael teased, and Maria inevitably elbowed him in his side. Tess came back with an 'Arizona omelet' for me - diced potatoes, ham, and onions mixed in - really good, even if I'd never heard of one before. Also plenty of bacon, an impressive short stack of pancakes, and some little hash brown potato wedges. That definitely more than made up for what she stole from me. I told her a bit about the amusement park idea before she left to get her own stuff - and she was all over the idea. (Maybe she just wanted to keep me from trying to drag her back into our room for more honeymooning, not sure, but anyway I had fairly high hopes.) Most of the rest of the gang left to line up for their seconds at this point, except Alex, because Isabel had taken Tess' idea about turnabout being fair play. I munched a bit and turned to Alex, who had finished his first plateful by this point, and was looking a little glum about not getting to wait in line next to Isabel and the rest of his friends, truth be told.

"Umm, so... sorry about not telling you about things, man," I said awkwardly. "It'd have been nice to have you as best man, actually. I just... we'd gotten so used to sneaking around, as if going through all of this made things sexier and more romantic, and we thought that some of the gang might try to stop us, and... well, would you have insisted on telling everybody else if we let you know?"

"Hmm..." Alex thought about that calmly. "I... I'm not that sure. Probably you could have convinced me to keep things reasonably private if you'd tried hard enough." He shrugged. "Doesn't really matter, though. What's done is done... and I hope that you and Tess work out any remaining issues and have a great start to your lives together." Pause. "Also, can I borrow a potato wedge?" I laughed and held my plate out for Alex to catch one of the wedges with his fork. "Thankya."

Nobody seemed in any kind of a hurry to leave the buffet before eleven, which was about the earliest that they'd be throwing anybody out, I figured. I asked Alex, once Isabel had finally gotten back, (this two-times round the buffet deal did take a while,) if he'd be willing to consider swapping rooms with Tess, so that we could move back into this hotel with the rest of them and give up our suite further away, since it looked like we'd be spending more time with the rest of the gang from here on out. Tess glared at me a little, like she was angry that I'd put the two of them publicly on the spot, and Alex and Isabel were discussing it in very hushed voices for over a minute, but finally Isabel told us that they'd be able to work it out. Tess turned to me at that point and said that we needed to make sure we could check out before noon, then, and still nobody really knew if there was an amusement park that we could go to.

"Okay, alright, just... I have one more thing I want to get you," I said, and kissed Tess on the edge of the mouth before hurrying up to the fruits and pastries buffet. It took a while to settle on the best item for what I had in mind, but eventually I brought it back and set it in front of her. "They - umm, I wanted to get you some cake for our wedding, but they didn't exactly have cake, so I figured a muffin could stand in for our wedding cake." It was the biggest muffin that I'd ever seen... five, maybe six inches across. "It... it's stupid, isn't it? Worse than nothing - I shouldn't have even tried..."

"No, stupid," Tess replied. "Of course you should have. It was a great idea." She grinned at me, a smile so bright it almost hit me like a physical impact. "Okay, come on, we've got to do this right."

"Do what right?"

For answer, Tess picked up a table knife and concentrated at it. A bunch of little food crumbs from Tess' waffles and eggs that had been sticking to it suddenly fell away, and I realized that she'd cleaned it with her powers. "Now, put your hand over mine..." Suddenly, I realized that Tess was recreating that cliche 'wedding cake moment' - of course. I should have expected that. With the bride and the groom making the first cut in the cake together. It was kind of cool in a way, though also slightly silly. Maybe that fit us well. "Okay, who wants a piece?"

"You're supposed to give Kyle the first taste of it," Isabel supplied helpfully, "feeding it to him with your fingers." Tess turned to stare at her. "Trust me, I know from wedding traditions. And you have to save your slice of the cake - it'll bring you good luck as long as you have it. Keep it in a freezer or something."

"Okay, first things first," Tess said, slicing out a very thin slice of the muffin and tearing off a bit with her fingers. "Does he have to feed me by hand too?"

"Umm..." Isabel blinked in surprise. "Up to you I think."

"I'll be happy to," I put in, realizing that Tess thought the feeding by hand bit was a little silly and demeaning and wanted to give it back. Personally, I thought that **being** fed by hand was possibly the more embarrassing side - but I didn't really want to mess with tradition, so I let Tess offer me a bit of muffin, (it tasted really good, actually,) and then took most of what was left of that first tiny slice and brought it up to her lips with my fingers. Tess swallowed and considered what was left of the muffin.

"Okay, umm... one slice to keep - but where the heck am I going to put it before we get back home?" she complained softly.

"There are little ice cube trays on the mini-fridges in our rooms," Liz put in. "One of those will keep it well frozen I think."

"Yeah, I'll take it upstairs and put it in your room before I pack up all my stuff," Alex offered.

Tess made a 'hang on' gesture and thought for a moment. "Okay, one to keep. Who else wants some?" All three girls raised their hands, and Alex, so Tess split what was left of the muffin into five. As it was distributed, Tess continued. "Why do I have to switch rooms anyway? Why can't it be Kyle and Isabel?"

"Because you don't really want Isabel to have to pack up all her stuff," Alex said. "I'm a guy, so I don't have much to pack, and you never really got fully unpacked Tess. It's easier on us." Tess considered that, and sighed in acceptance.

"Well, I guess this is our cue to go over and check out of our other room, then," I suggested. "See you guys upstairs."

"Alright, I guess" Michael replied.

"No, come on, time isn't that tight," Liz argued. "It's your wedding reception - you can't split before the cake is even finished!"

"I've been to some wedding receptions like that," Maria put in.

"Yeah, but only when the bride and groom were being whisked off to a private wedding night or to their honeymoon flight," Isabel put in. "They've already had the wedding night, and... well, I guess they're already on their honeymoon too, but they'll be spending the day with us probably. I'd like the happy couple to stick around a bit longer." So of course Tess wanted to stay after that.

Let's see... I've kinduv gone on and one about this breakfast, so let's go over things quickly. Everyone finished their cake, I paid for everybody's buffet out of the craps money, and Tess and I got checked out of our fancy hotel room and she moved into the room that Alex and I had gotten from the start. Max and Liz had gone through the brochures available, and finally asked the front desk clerk about amusement parks. Apparently things were done a little bit different in Vegas - instead of having traditional style amusement parks out on the edge of town, the big hotel-casinos had preemptively built coasters and other theme-park type attractions themselves. The biggest and most impressive was the Adventure-dome, a five-acre indoor amusement park adjoining on Circus circus. Everybody agreed to go and check that out.

Of course, Tess and I both wanted to change clothes for an amusement park afternoon, since we'd dressed up all fancy for breakfast. I got into jeans and an orange-yellow t shirt, while Tess put on blue cotton shorts and a rainbow-dyed tank top which wasn't quite like anything I'd ever seen her in before, but it really suited her and the occasion. I pulled her into my arms for a moment before we left our room. "Do you... is there anything else that we need to talk about, after breakfast?" I asked quietly. "I... I know that you like playing the part of the bride in front of the rest of the gang, but have you come to a decision about whether you'll still want to be my wife after Vegas is behind us?"

"No... I - I dunno," Tess mumbled. "It... I think that I've told myself it's not something I can decide by breaking down the facts and analyzing them rationally. If... if I just throw myself into whatever's happening, soon enough my heart will tell me what the right thing to do is."

"Then... then I think I'm confident," I told her. "Your heart and I have always gotten along fine." She giggled at that.

Most of the rest of the crew had also changed after breakfast - except for Michael and Alex, who'd been pretty casually dressed to begin with. We all set out for Circus circus, which was on the other side of the strip from this hotel and up aways. (Well, not on the other side as in that it was away from the strip like we were, just that we had to get to the strip, and then cross to the other side of the street, you know?) Lot of people watching, quite a few casino crawlers watching _us_, probably wondering what the kids were doing in bright and summery casuals that wouldn't really fit into any of the casinos, though I don't think many of them would actually throw out anybody who had money to spend over a dress code thing.

So we got to Circus circus, went through the lobby, and waited in line with a bunch of people for admittance to the park. It was an interesting comparison to look at the people who were going for 'the Dome' and think about how they differed from the people that we'd seen in the casinos. A bunch of families with kids, of course - and at least one group of kids who did indeed seem to be with a paid babysitter. Also some teenage or twenty-ish couples, a few couples who seemed to be noticeably older - a bunch of twentysomething babes all going together, (I had to try very hard not to stare too much, with my bride right next to me,) and a few frat boy type guys. No really old people that I noticed... which might just be because they had a bunch of more age-appropriate alternative activities elsewhere in Vegas.

So, we got through - everybody got the one-day passes on hunches, and started exploring the dome contents. "Ooh," Tess exclaimed. "I wanna try the waterfall runner!"

"Okay," I said, putting my arm around her. "But don't get your hopes up - you might not be above the minimum height." A few seconds passed, and I felt a hard pinch at the side of my waist. "Oww, that hurt!"


	5. Chapter 5

"Oh, man, I'm completely soaked!" Tess complained. For having just come out of the Rim Runner waterfall ride, the thought ran through my mind, she wasn't nearly soaked _enough_ - but I didn't say so out loud. Six of us had gone in this group, and nobody was really drenched head to toe, though Maria probably had the best and wettest wet t-shirt out of herself, Liz, and Tess. (Of course, Tess wasn't wearing a t-shirt at all, so maybe I should say 'wettest top.') Part of Tess' tie-dyed tank top was definitely splashed out enough to show a bit of a cling factor, (especially on the right side, as it happened,) but other parts were still almost completely dry. Her hair was closer to qualifying as 'soaked', and maybe that was what she was thinking of - I know I tend to think of myself as wetter when my hair is wet, and I don't have nearly as much hair to wet as she does. I do like the way her face looks when her hair is all wet - did I mention that already? And then, her shorts and legs seemed to be past 'damp' and into 'dripping', which was exciting in a completely different way... "What are you staring at?"

"Umm... the most beautiful bride in all of Vegas?" I said, hoping that between the vagueness and the flattery I'd be able to pre-empt any trouble. It seemed to work - though Tess did have a wicked glint in her eye as she nestled close and pushed her wetter half against some of my dryer spots - like I really cared so much about getting myself further wet when wet Tess Harding was pressing herself against me. "Umm... anyone up for going on the Canyon Blaster ride right now?"

"No, not right now," Tess decided. "Leave it as something to look forward to a bit later. Besides, I think the lines are still pretty long."

"I wouldn't bet that the lines are going to get any shorter, Tess," Michael countered. He probably had a point. That ride was possibly the Vegas Adventuredome's biggest draw - a loop-the-loop roller coaster that was advertised as running up to 55 miles per hour.

"I want to wait around here for Isabel and Alex to get off the Rim Runner," Liz suggested. Okay, that sounded good enough for me... and not just because getting a glimpse of Isabel in a wet t-shirt would be something to see, no matter how fiercely devoted I was to my new wife of something like sixteen hours. Alex would probably suggest something that none of us had thought of and would turn out to be a complete blast - he had had his nose stuck in the brochure since we got in, (well, not that that was such a long time, just long enough to find the Rim Runner, wait in line for it... and he **did** come out long enough to pay a little attention to Izzie now and then.) So I gotta figure that's going to pay off for us at some point - maybe now.

So we hung around and chatted about something that matters so little I can't even remember it, and then Alex and Isabel showed up - once again, Isabel's t-shirt was damp and splashed but not drenched. Were the alien girls using their powers to keep us guys from getting too good of a peek? Even Liz got well doused - not that she's terribly big in the chest, but still, there were some nice lines there. Oh well. I guess all of this obsessing with wet tops was starting to get a little bit immature, even by my standards, and I tried to put it out of my mind at this point.

So Max asked Alex what he thought would be a good ride to try next - Alex mentioned the sling-shot tower, and the flip-speeder, but it was the whirling wheel of Chaos that attracted the most attention from the rest of us. After that Max and Liz, Michael and Maria wanted to go off and play the mini-golf, (yawn,) while Tess led me to the bumper cars, and Alex and Isabel followed along behind us. We went through once and started waiting through the line for a second go, but apparently there was some sort of technical difficulties that brought the ram-slamming action to a standstill. With no particular indication about how long the delay might be, and too many people waiting behind us to make a quick or easy exit, Isabel turned to dialog as an escape from the boredom. "So, Tess... what are you gonna tell Mister Valenti when you get back home?"

I watched Tess' face carefully. Would she confess that she wasn't sure if our marriage would still be much of an issue by the time we got home? If so, it would be hard to keep the news from spreading far, and she knew it. Myself, I kind of wanted her to keep up the play acting, so I had to force myself to breathe. Finally, Tess giggled softly. "Come on... he's Kyle's dad. I don't have to tell him anything, I'll just leave that to my brave and kind husband." Alex chuckled at that.

"Why did you guys disappear so quickly, anyway?" Alex asked. "And... come on, you can tell us a little bit more of that story with the consequences. We won't spill it to the other guys - I promise."

Tess looked around. "No, I don't think you would - but frankly I don't think it's something I should be going on about in these kind of circumstances." Alex scanned the area himself, realizing that there were strangers standing close all about us. All probably bored, and probably a number of them were listening to strangers' conversations as a way of amusing themselves.

But Alex's eyes twinkled with something that, if it wasn't a kind of mischievous glee, was certainly close. "Okay then," he said softly. "Whisper it in my ear, so that nobody else could possibly hear."

Tess considered that for just a moment. "You're gonna have to bend _way_ over, boy," she pointed out. "Otherwise I'd never be able to reach your ear." This was self-evidently true. Alex had probably almost a foot's height advantage over Tess... she's always said that she's 'five foot two and eyes of blue', just like in the song, and Alex is probably between six foot and six foot two. (Tess wasn't wearing **any** heels today, which just made all of that disparity more evident, rather than cheating a little bit of it away.) So Alex looked around, and instead of bending over, he sat down against one of the little half-walls that they used to corral the line into a rectangular holding area. Tess considered a moment and squatted down next to him, whispering in his ear for a fairly long time.

I looked around, catching Isabel's eye, wondering if she seemed nervous or uncomfortable about being let out of the secrets that my wife was telling her boyfriend, but Isabel had sat down perching on top of the opposite wall and was watching with an amused smile on her perfectly chiseled face. Everybody had mostly dried out by now after the water ride, and Isabel Evans looked like about as cool and suave a lady as you might ever meet... rich dark golden blonde hair loose and straight, falling well past her shoulders, her signature designer blue jeans and black high-heel leather boots, and a black t-shirt with Bugsy Siegel's face and name blazoned on the front of it.

Finally, just as I was nearly going crazy wondering exactly how much Tess was telling Alex, she stopped sharing. Alex grinned once, just for a moment, and got up. "Okay, umm. Well, that was - interesting. Oh, hey, something's happening." Sure enough. there was some sort of commotion in the middle of the bumper car park - a guy climbing up on a ladder, possibly on his way to examine some part of the electrical system that the cars ran off of. "I hope they've turned off all the juice first," I muttered without thinking about it.

"They probably know that much, Kyle," Isabel shot back.

"Hey, don't talk to my husband that way," Tess replied. I had almost got my grateful look put together for her when, "Now it's my job to come in first with the witty comeback." Oh well. If she wanted to claim that as one of the perquisites of being my wife - of course I wouldn't refuse it her.

"Speaking of husbands and wives," Isabel said, turning to Tess. "Have you given any thought yet to the name thing?"

"Umm... what name thing?" Tess asked, but her dumb-play wasn't terribly convincing.

"Oh, come on, you know," Alex said, getting into it. "Personally, I think that Tess Valenti has a ring to it. Or Tess Harding-Valenti maybe." He thought about it. "Do you have a middle name, Tess?"

"Christine," I said absently. "Tess Christine Valenti. Doesn't sound horrible." Tess shot me a nasty look, and I wasn't sure if it was more for giving away her middle name to the others or for adding my two cent's worth to the discussion of her taking my last name, but... well, it was worth it anyway.

Just then, though, the line started moving again, and there was enough hubbub and noise from everyone else who'd been waiting the whole time that the topic of conversation got lost. We were in the second group to go after the long delay, and when we came out Michael and Maria were waiting for us outside the bumper cars exit.

"Hey, that wasn't long for eighteen holes," Alex remarked with a wink.

"Michael made me give up after eight," Maria sighed. "Sore loser. Max and Liz are completing the course."

"I'm sorry," Michael said with a sigh. "Just don't see why I should have to stick with something that I'm not doing well with and not having fun at." He kissed Maria. "And I didn't **make** you do anything. I said that I'd appreciate your company, but nothing more. If you really wanted to stick with Max and Liz, then I wouldn't have minded much."

"Yeah, and been the third wheel? No thanks." Maria sighed. "So, come on, anybody else got good ideas?"

"Umm, I could do with some lunch," Alex remarked.

"Oh, none for me thanks," Tess said. "Still stuffed from breakfast... well, nearly stuffed enough that I can wait another hour or so." Isabel ended up accompanying Alex in search of food, and Michael and Maria, Tess and I started wandering around the park looking for the next fun thing to do. We ended up settling on a 'movie ride' - a big enclosed cart with three rows of seats, that was set up to move and tremble as directed by a computer, precisely synchronized to the three-walled Imax screen that surrounded it. Really gave me the feeling of being in a kind of tour bus that had been harpooned and was being dragged and crashed through an enormous computer-animated world. (I think the ride was based off some Canadian cartoon show that I was at best vaguely familiar with. Still - big fun.)

After that, Michael and Maria went off alone, and Tess said that she wanted to sit down and rest just a little. So I found a bench, and as it just happened, we were near enough to look at some of the kiddie rides - the frog hoppers were just ahead and to the left, and further away on our right was the coal bin rider.

"Do... do you remember that flash that you told me about last night?" I suddenly blurted out. "About... about us having a son, and his first Christmas?"

Tess made out a kind of strangled squeal. "Yes, yes baby, of - of course I do." She sighed very loudly. "If... if I said that I wanted to get started on a divorce before we left Nevada, would - would that split us up forever, or for a long time?" I couldn't reply immediately. "I... I do love you, Kyle, and I want to be with you. I'm just... I'm really not sure I'm ready to be married."

"Well, okay, let's see." I took a deep breath. "I... I love you to, and yes, I'd want to be your boyfriend regardless of... well, if we hadn't gotten married yesterday, I'd definitely want to be your boyfriend... now or when we go back to Roswell, whenever." Slight moan. "But... but I can't deny that divorce is a big thing for me, mostly because of my Mom leaving me. I... I don't want to have to go through it, and... and if we get divorced, I don't know if I'd really be okay with just 'dialing back' to dating. I... I hate to admit that, but it's probably true. Not... not because I'd hold any of this against you, just - having to deal with my own hangups."

"I... I see," Tess remarked, a bit sadly, and then there was... well, not real silence, though neither of us was saying anything. The kids on the hoppers were making too much noise for anything to be quiet.

"I... I didn't tell you about my own flash, did I?" I asked. "About you and me, and our family."

"No, I guess you didn't," she remarked, and suddenly I was blurting all of it out - the summer mountain cabin or whatever, seeing her walk up to me and hug me, carrying a little child in pink - two boys running around and chasing each other. I probably got a lot of the order mixed up, just because I was so excited. Tess face became more and more a study in contrasts, upset and smiling at the same time somehow. "I... I'm not sure you're not just making this more difficult for me," she finally said once I was done.

"Maybe... maybe I'm making it harder for you to take the easy way out of this marriage," I said. "I can live with that."

"Yeah, I'll just bet that you can." Tess sighed. "Okay, come on - let's see if Max and Liz are finished with their putt-putt."

#

Tess and I waited around a little while Max and Liz finished the last three holes on the mini-golf course. Then we rode the slingshot tower ride together, and Tess insisted we go to the snack bar for lunch, because she was finally hungry enough to eat again. Michael and Maria were there when we arrived, and apparently we'd only just missed Alex and Isabel, though that must have been a very long lunch that they'd had. Pretty soon Michael kissed Maria goodbye and headed off on his lonesome - not quite sure why he was in such a hurry to get away from the grub, but... well, it doesn't really matter that much, now does it?

"You **have** to give me some of your lunch if I ask," Tess argued with effort and chutzpah. "It's common law or something now."

Hmm... Now, just how much should I let my dear darling bride get away with on those grounds? Certainly more than this, and I took the untouched half of my roast beef sandwich and put it on her place. Then I took a few of her chicken nuggets back to mine. "Fair's fair. Common law cuts both ways."

"You didn't even ask," Tess argued. "Without that, it's theft."

"Okay - darling Tess, could I have some of those tasty pieces of poultry in exchange?" She hesitated a moment, then nodded a silent and regal assent.

"I have to admit, watching you guys go back and forth with it like that," Maria remarked. "You look... in fact - a toast to the happy couple!" She lifted up her plastic cup of soda. "I can't believe that we forgot to do this part at the reception,"

"Umm - I appreciate the thought and everything - I really do," Tess put in. "But - um, shouldn't you wait with that until everybody is here?"

"Yeah, alright. So... so you guys actually did it," Liz suddenly said, not really apropos of anything. "You got married in Vegas."

"Umm, yeah," Tess said, looking at her oddly. "Probably wouldn't have had the patience to get married anywhere else, or... well, you know what I mean, just possibly." She sighed, took a small bite of my sandwich, and looked oddly at Liz. "Why is that an 'it', anyway? I mean... it's not like you were expecting us to pull something like this, were you?"

"Umm..." Liz didn't say anything, and Tess cut a hunk out of the sandwich away from where she'd bitten into it and carefully moved that part back over to me. I wasn't sure if she wasn't favorably impressed with it... no, if she didn't like the sandwich, she could have given more back than that. Maybe just didn't think she was that hungry? Well, it was appreciated anyway. "I... know, I guess I didn't expect that **you** guys would get married here."

At first, I didn't really pay any attention to the way she'd put that. But Maria turned to stare over at Liz, and that managed to attract my attention. Had... had Liz thought that somebody else would run away to get married in Vegas? Michael and Maria? Herself and Max? Hmm... well, I guess it didn't really matter that much. I tried eating a bit of sandwhich and a bit of chicken at the same time - it didn't really work out that well, from a taste blending perspective.

"Well, I do wish you guys all the best," Max said, smiling pleasantly. Somehow I didn't have any trouble interpreting that. 'Yes, Kyle, by all means, stay married to Tess, and keep her romantically occupied so that I don't have to ever be slightly worried that she'll come after me one more time and torpedo my relationship with my true soulmate.' I'm trying, Evans buddy, I'm trying as hard as I can, but it's not as easy as it looks. Anything constructive that you can do to help would be appreciated, but I didn't know what that wa... oh, hey now!

The biggest problem here was that Tess wasn't really being too serious when she acted married to me - she was playing the part happily enough, but only in a 'showboating for the crowd' sense. If... if Max, particularly, started to condescend to her on the subject of our marriage, pretending that it was some really foolish stunt that she was pulling and that she wasn't capable of treating her relationship with me seriously - then, would Tess start to invest more seriously in the idea just as a way of counter-reacting? A form of reverse psychology, in a way?

Well, Tess is sometimes the sort of person that reverse psychology works on, but this was one time that I **couldn't** use it - she couldn't know I had anything to do with the ploy, or it would backfire horribly. Would I be able to pull it off on those terms? I tried to push the idea aside for now without letting myself completely forget it.

We continued eating and chatting and enjoyed some yogurt cones for desert, and then, just as all five of us were leaving the snack bar, Michael Guerin just kinduv pops up out of nowhere. "Laser draft," he said, pressing a little card into Maria's hands. "Laser draft, laser draft..." he kept the moronic chant up while serving each of us. By the time he got to me, Maria had been staring at her 'draft card' for a good ten seconds or so.

"Michael, what the hell is this?"

"Well, hmm." Michael paused a long moment before deciding how to begin. "The Adventuredome happens to boast of a fine Laser war battleground."

"Yes," Maria said. "I told you when we were waiting outside in the entrance line that I would not be playing laser tag under _any_ circumstances, and these charmingly crude 'draft slips' are no exception."

"It's not laser tag," Michael protested. "It's not any kind of tag, it's..." Apparently he figured out that arguing over such a trivial point was not the best way to winning his temperamental girlfriend over. "Come on, we have to fight for Roswell honor - for New Mexico honor, even. I've been challenged to a grudge match by this bunch of California frat boys, and we can _totally_ take them - if we all work together."

"These frat boys, Michael," Liz asked casually from the sidelines. "Were you running your mouth off in front of them, trash talking, and practically **begging** them for a challenge?"

"Well, maybe I jived a little," Michael said. "But that was after they'd already started in on the 'Cali's so great, everywhere else sucks' routine. One of them asked Izzy where she was from, and then all of them joined in with totally making fun of Roswell."

"Even Roswell makes fun of Roswell," Max said. "Come on, we've made an industry out of having a sense of humor about ourselves."

"This was different," Alex volunteered. "There's friendly joking, and then there's serious insults. That holds true for places as well as people. I'm with Michael on this one - time to teach a few frat boys a lesson." I suddenly wondered if there'd been more to this encounter between Isabel and the frat boys than Roswell-mocking. Had they tried crude come-ons, or insulted her specifically? Had Alex tried to interfere and not have it go as well as he'd have liked?

"Well, I'm always up for some laser war," I said. "What'd you think, dear?"

Tess smiled a mean smile. "Nobody picks on Roswell around here but me."

Good enough. "Max?" Michael asked, and reluctantly, he nodded slightly.

"I'll... I'll go if you go, Liz... or if you, umm... if you don't mind my signing up for the cause."

Liz laughed. "What the heck, it sounds like a larf, though I'm not sure I'll be that much good in a firefight. Never been that much of a... of a gun person, you know."

"Oh, god, baby, I didn't even think of that," Max said, but Liz shhshed him down. Obviously, if she'd still had _that_ much gun trauma from the shooting, she would never have agreed to join our squad. That left only Maria - if she stood by her oath about not going into the arena, (metaphorical or literal, I wasn't sure,) then she'd be the only one.

"Okay, if you guys really want me to make it unanimous, then I'll come," she muttered with bad grace. Liz, Isabel, Alex, and Tess immediately cheered her on, and Max and I mumbled a few enthusiastic things. (Michael didn't comment one way or another - probably he felt it would have been overkill.) So we all went off to wait for the appointed time, meet our enemies, suit up, and so on.

One thing that I'm surprised neither Michael nor Alex, (the people who had met the frat boys already,) had mentioned about them was how very sexist they seemed... maybe they hadn't known. But when Maria pointed out that there were only seven of them, one laughed and said that since four of our team were girls, then that tipped the balance back in their favor, as if the female of the species was only worth half of a man at best. Some of the other 'brothers' started arguing about how big of a handicap they should give us in recognition of these circumstances. The notion really didn't go over well with Tess or Maria, and even Liz seemed peeved off. (Isabel seemed icily dismissive of the college guys through this whole exchange.) Somehow I suspected that Tess and Maria would be more dangerous than any man once the fighting started.

The laser war attendant gave us our rifles and helped us into our special laser-sensitive vests, and explained some of the rules and circumstances of the fighting. Combat would take place in a kind of labyrinth, with neither side sure of the right route to take to get from their HQ to the enemies' position. Shooting an enemy soldier could 'wound' him temporarily or kill him permanently, but resulted in minimum points. (Participating inappropriately when you were wounded or dead could be an automatic disqualification for your side, a fact I filed away for strategic use later. If I could manage to kill one of the enemy and them taunt him into attacking me physically, say with a punch, then we could win the whole match right there.)

Shooting various 'strategic targets' on the enemy side of the maze was worth medium points, but the big scores were reserved for capturing the other side's "prize" and bringing it back out of their territory - a little bit like capture the flag. I was a little worried about this maze thing too - had the other side played this thing before? The attendant said that the maze was never the same twice, but still, they might have some overall familiarity about the kinds of ways it usually went, which would translate into a big terrain disadvantage for us. There was only so many ways that you could change an attraction like this, when you were running groups through it all day.

Still, everybody was reasonably confident when the buzzer sounded, and we rushed out into green HQ through a door from the staging area, which closed once all eight of us were through. "Okay, first thing is that we need to explore the nearby extent of the maze," Michael said, taking charge at once. "Find our strategic targets so that we can plan to defend them. Figure out which passages are dead ends - we can try to herd enemy into them and trap them there - and which are loops, and which lead out towards enemy territory."

That pretty much made sense to me. There were two exits from HQ, with one of them splitting fairly soon, so we broke up into three groups - Maria joined Tess and me, Michael went with Alex and Isabel, and Max and Liz were group three. Pretty soon Max and Liz called up that that their split was a dead-end, with one of our targets contained inside.

"Alright," Tess suggested... or maybe it was more like giving orders. Hard to tell for sure in a situation like that. "Stick close, defend our HQ, and try to find any other nearby targets. We're going to keep on with this split and see if it leads us into enemy territory. Kay?"

"Um, okay Tess," Liz said after a moment. I wondered what she was thinking, if it was still hard for her to go along with what Tess was saying. But this tactic did seem to make a lot of sense. The corridor that we were following continued straight for a while, and then emerged into an area from which there were four other passageways, the first two of which turned out to be pretty clearly dead-ends. All of a sudden, I saw the green beam of a laser gun's target-finder shining from the remaining left corridor to hit the wall above Tess.

"Get down!" I hissed, and when she didn't seem to react, I hurried over and pulled her out of danger about as gently as I could.

"Wait a second," Maria muttered. "I... I think that that's friendly fire. They said that the other guns would have a slightly different color beams that we did." And before I could warn her to be careful even so, she called off in the direction that the light had come from. (It was gone now.) "Spaceboy?"

"Umm, yeah he's here," Isabel's reply came back. "I... I guess that our branches met up."

"Yeah," Tess replied, straightening up again and giving me an odd look for my over-eager protectiveness. "Is this the only way that your exit led to?"

Alex and Isabel came into view, with Michael enthusiastically guarding their rear approach. "Not really. We found two dead ends, one of which had a strategic target, and one left-wise passage that we didn't get a chance to explore yet."

"Okay, so that's two passages yet," Maria said. "Either of which could easily split into several , the way that this maze is going. And we haven't seen any of the college boys yet. What's our next move?"

"Shhh!" Isabel went, and everybody went silent. Sure enough, I could just about hear quiet footfalls up the front-right way from our five-cross. This was it - our first tactical contact with the enemy. Was it good luck or bad that six of us were here? Do we charge ahead, make a stand, or fall back?

Isabel made a series of gestures that I couldn't immediately make anything of, especially in the dimness of the maze, and Tess grabbed my arm and led me out of the open. By watching, some of the details of the alleged plan became clear... Michael and Alex were heading back to the other intersection that they had come from, in case the enemy might circle around and come into our territory that way. (And just how large _was_ our territory, anyway? Was there a third strategic target that we hadn't even found yet? Maybe the others would find it first.) Meanwhile, Tess and I, Maria, and Isabel were all taking cover at different points around the five-cross, hoping that our opponents would blunder into it and we'd have a chance to crossfire them, or at the very least that one of us would be able to catch some of them by surprise.

That was how it was supposed to work, at least. But what I hadn't expected was that one forward scout came into the area by himself, trying to check around him as he went, but there was no way that he was going to spot any of us really in time. I didn't want to zap him too soon and warn the others coming behind, if possible, but it just wasn't possible - he moved close enough that he'd have spotted the two of us any instant, and then Tess fired - _Bam_! Right in the chestplate, and he went down. I noticed Isabel firing from her own hiding place, making sure that the scout was thoroughly tagged enough that his suit would lock up and 'kill' him, instead of merely forcing him to go back to his HQ to get his gun working again - that way, he'd be able to report to the others. And so we waited, wondering what the rest of the enemy squad would do. Would they have heard a body hit the floor? The scout - I think that he had made one soft strangled cry as he was shot, but he wasn't screaming a warning now - you weren't supposed to after you went into lockup, that was the 'play dead' condition. (I wasn't sure if his team would have been penalized if he'd broken the rule, or not.) But they'd probably notice that he wasn't still leading the way.

We waited, but there were no signs of any enemy following, and then - more fighting a little ways away. Maybe they had circled round, alert to the possibility of a trap here, and had gone Michael and Alex's route. Isabel immediately charged over there, and Maria came over to join Tess and me. In a series of very soft whispers it was decided that we would go on ahead and try to make it to the enemy HQ, while the other teams worried about defense back here. We'd taken down one enemy man already, and this was probably pretty close to enemy territory, or even inside it. There would be possible danger on the road ahead, but it was worth a try.

Taking a trick from our rivals, I volunteered to go ahead as a forward scout - it was a dangerous job, obviously, but one man putting himself in danger here could easily save two of his fellow soldiers, and maybe win the game that way. So I crept on ahead, trying to explore new expanses of the maze as silently and safely as possible. There was a kind of a loop around a U shaped structure, like a cubicle of maze walls, and several new ways to go. I hung back just long enough for Tess to catch up, not sure. She touched my free hand with hers and I got a bracing bolt of flash-communication. 'That one, right up ahead, and careful. If we've been moving from our HQ out into enemy territory, then that is where the enemy HQ should be. Careful, they probably have guards right around the bend.'

I moved towards the passage that she had indicated, and heard something, surely enough - faint human breathing. It would be hard to storm their HQ with just the three of us if they were guarding carefully, and anyway - there was more to this situation than there seemed. I tried hard to concentrate, aware of the possibility of an enemy laser strike taking me out at any moment, but things started to fall into place. First... if that was their HQ just beyond that wall, then there would be more than one approach to it, just like there had been to ours - probably the other route was accessible by the next passageway over to the left. Also - also they had to have minor strategic targets hidden in dead-ends somewhere around here, and I'm not sure how well they'd be guarded. It made sense to try to find those first... but I wasn't sure how to convey that to the girls without getting us discovered.

Maria, though, seemed to have the second part of that brainwave already. She made another strange gesture to Tess, headed off to the far right passage. I considered following her or going to the leftish, but I was thinking of the bad guys... (well, they probably weren't really evil guys, just annoying fratsters,) who would be guarding the enemy base. If Tess was alone around here, would they come out and try to shoot her down? She'd probably get mad at me for thinking that I had to protect her in any way, but... well, I wanted to anyway.

Sure enough, someone poked around a corner - I couldn't get a good shot off, and he didn't hit either of us either, and backed off when he realized that there were two rifles out here. Soon Maria had come back, giving us a thumbs up, and I felt confident enough to try a raid on enemy HQ.

But how? I had thought of one idea, but I couldn't pull it off myself and wasn't sure if my darling bride would go for it. So I turned to Tess and tapped my forehead as meaningfully as I could with the laser war helmet on. She thought for a moment and smiled. Maria took a moment to direct the traffic with hand gestures, that for once I was able to read, and we put the plan into action. I slipped up the 'back way' to enemy HQ, while the girls guarded the other way in, and we all silently counted to sixty as a crude way of synchronizing the timing.

I'm not clear on exactly what did happen when the sixty seconds were up - maybe the mindwarp that Tess was casting had slopped over a little bit. But by the end of it, three guards were 'dead' on the floor, out around the U loop, and Maria had the enemy prize tucked into her laser war suit. Very roughly, the plan had been for me to come up and provide a diversion, at the same time as Tess laid the mindwarp down with the hope of panicking them, chasing the guards into a venus trap. I think it pretty much worked.

"Okay, I don't think there's likely any other guards around here," Tess muttered, a smile plastered over her face. "We probably missed a few strategic targets, but they aren't as important as that." (With a gesture to point at what was concealed by Maria's pants in the vicinity of her hip.) "We need to bring it back - and if the enemy has managed to capture _our_ prize by now, we need to make sure that they don't get it back here, right?"

"Yeah, that sounds about right," I said. "Do we take the same route back, or go another way?"

The girls exchanged looks. "You remember the way back?" Maria asked.

"Umm, yeah."

"Then you take this, and get back," she said. "We'll find the other route." And she tossed me the little electric red candy cane that was the enemy prize.

"Are... are you sure that splitting up makes sense?" I asked.

"No," Tess admitted. "But it seems better than staying together." And all of a sudden she threw herself at me and kissed me - or at least tried to. Our helmets made it hard to do anything but brush our lips very lightly together, and rub noses eskimo style. But the thought still knocked my socks off, that she'd _tried_ to kiss me. Was that a deliberate attempt to get me to do what I was told? (If we only stayed married, somehow I could picture Tess using that sort of tactics to try and get her way a lot, and I probably wouldn't mind letting them work.) And so, this time, I shut up and started to run.

I took one wrong turning - the maze didn't look quite the same flipped around as it had coming, though I'd tried to check back the way I'd come to memorize the route as we went. However, I didn't lose much time because I figured out that something was wrong right away and doubled back. When I returned to the green HQ, Liz's was waiting around, her rifle almost powered back up. She must have been hit. but not 'killed' Max lay unmoving on the ground near her. "Uh-oh. What happened?" I asked, as I took the candy cane back out of my vest and stuck it into the spot where our prize had been torn out.

"We... we tried our best, but they were good," Liz muttered. "Max and Michael didn't want to use their powers if they didn't have to, and then it was too late. I think we only left one or two of them alive, but they got the prize, most of our strategics, and..." Liz shushed suddenly, as the sound of scuffling and laser fire broke out from elsewhere in the maze. When it died down... the maze door opened back up, and the maze partition walls started to slide aside, up, or down, revealing most of the rectangular room that served as the game field.

"Game is over," an attendant announced over the loudspeakers, and Max quickly sat up. "All players please exit by the nearest HQ. Team Green are the winners. Good game, all."

So the three of us went through the door, and as it happened all of the rest of our team and a lot of the frat boys were nearer to our HQ than theirs, so we waited up to chat and figure out what else had happened in the game.

#

"You, you should have seen her, Michael," Tess was saying as we waited in the extremely long lineup for the big roller-coaster.

"You weren't so bad yourself, Tess," Maria replied softly, but my wife didn't pay any attention.

"We had just figured out which way led back to our side of the maze, and then all of a sudden there they were. My first instinct was to dive for cover, but not Maria DeLuca. She knew that even if she had to give up her 'life', she had to stop them from getting our prize back to the enemy HQ, so in she charged. _Bam_ and one of them was down. _Bam-Bam_ and she got winged on the arm..."

"And that's when Tess dived out and shot the other guy in both legs," Maria reported. "He got me in the head just as he was collapsing, but that was it. I guess that they decided that the red team didn't have any reasonable chance left of taking our prize home, and that we had therefore won."

"Not bad," Isabel said, clapping Maria and Tess on the back. "Oh, and congrats to you too, Kyle."

"Yeah," I said. "I just got _their_ prize back home to HQ."

"Without facing any enemy soldiers along the way," Maria shot back, but she was smiling, willing enough for the credit of victory to be shared. All three of us were heroes, I figured, and even the heroic defense of team Green HQ, though not entirely successful, had made for a thrilling tale. Now, most of the day had gotten away from us, and the general feeling was that hitting the big roller coaster was the last thing that we needed to do before leaving AdventureDome and heading back out onto the strip. Probably everybody else would want to head back to the hotel, maybe grab something to eat and crash. I felt... well, I wasn't sure how I felt. It had been a good day, and also kind of tiring, but still I felt buzzed and wasn't sure I wanted to go to sleep anytime soon...

"Hey." Tess stepped close to me with a little wave - and I mean close. Considering the line that we were jammed into, staying close was probably the only way of having any kind of privacy. But Tess pressing so close to me just made me think of other things. "I... I'm sorry if I've been the queen of the land of the two faced today, I just... I'm not sure how to react to this situation that we've gotten ourselves into, Kyle. If... if I did, then I wouldn't have a problem going along with it. But I'm really sorry if that's made your day more difficult."

Huh. Well, chalk one more up in the list of ways Tess was surprising me. How was it that I never realized how little I knew about her until we got married... and yet somehow that seemed like a good thing. She had spoken _**very**_ softly, almost just breathing the words, and I tried my best to reply in kind so that our friends wouldn't clue in to exactly what was going on. "Well... I do understand your doubts, and the idea of feeling like you're not sure where to take our marriage." A pause. "Would it be possible, though, for both of us to just ride the current, as it were, and pretend that we're in this for keeps until it's time to go home? Would that be so wrong? I... I just want to enjoy our vacation, and there are aspects of being married to you that are _very_ fun. Maybe, maybe everything will look different once we go back to Roswell, and my dad and the rest of senior year and the prospect of college. If you want a divorce then, or an annulment or whatever, then fine." I was starting to worry that I wasn't being quiet enough, that some of the others could hear, but somehow couldn't stop my big whisper-iloquy. "I won't fight you on whatever you want, if... if you just give us this much of a chance. Is... is that okay?"

"Whatever I want," Tess replied softly. "And... and if what I want is for both of us to go our own ways, and not even see each other after it's all done?"

My throat tightened. "I... I'm not sure." The prospect of losing the love that I'd discovered with Tess so completely was a shocker. "If... if you're _really_ sure that that's what you want, then I suppose it doesn't make that much sense to force my love onto you... but I'd definitely try very hard to make sure that that's your desire, and not just a decision you were making because you were scared, or mad at me, or something else that doesn't really matter."

Tess smiled, and giggled softly. "That's the right answer." Hmm... so she was testing me, huh? "And... and you've got a deal. I... I guess I'm worried, though, that... that if I really throw myself into this marriage thing, then I'll fall hard, as it were, and maybe get my heart hurt."

"I... I'll do whatever I can to catch you," I replied. "That, that may not be enough, but..."

"Hey, c'mon guys, move it!" Michael suddenly exclaimed. I tried to turn around and lost my balance for a second or two, because the press of the crowd that had been at my back suddenly wasn't there to offset the press of Tess, and through her, the rest of the gang crowding behind. The line was moving, and we'd been too caught up in what we were so softly saying to notice. Tess reached out and caught me, and we walked side by side the few feet to where the rest of the line left off, but somehow a moment was lost, and when we began talking again it was to join into a conversation about some reality game show that was going to start airing in a few weeks.

So, let's see. We rode the coaster - a pretty good one considering the space constraints, and did the swinging sand pirate ship, and then Max and Liz, Isabel, Alex, and Maria did all want to go back to the hotel. I considered staying in the dome with Michael and Tess, but Maria started to whisper something in Michael's ear, and... well, we all went back out onto the strip, headed in the vicinity of our hotel, found what looked like a pretty good Texas fusion restaurant along the way there and piled in there to wait for a dinner table. The restaurant was attached to one of the smaller motels, actually, and had a vinyl jukebox loaded up with all kinds of weird hip-hop and world music singles. There was a stage where people from the dinner tables were coming up - at first I thought it was karaoke, but apparently they were doing open-mike free verse, sometimes spoken over the songs. Jeez, only in Vegas, man.

After dessert at the Texan place, we finally made it back to the hotel, and Max, Liz, Maria, and Michael went up to their rooms, while Isabel, Alex, Tess and I had some coffee at the bar. I honestly couldn't remember by that point if we'd discussed the sleeping arrangements - ie if I was once again back to rooming with Alex, or if somebody would be switching rooms, so that Tess and I would be together, and Alex and Isabel would sort out sleeping in the same room however they might. Thought about asking, but I didn't want to look particularly foolish about it.

We'd only just started on our drinks, though, when this kinda tall blond guy, maybe twenty-five or so, probably out of what I'd usually think of as college age anyway, came up to Alex. "Hey, man... Alex, right? We met at the digital games convention the other day."

Tess blinked. "You're in Vegas, and you go to a digital games convention?"

"Well, why not?" Isabel said, looking at Alex affectionately. "That's his idea of a perfect... I dunno, I was trying for a really good metaphor there, or maybe a simile, but I haven't got it."

"His dream come true," I muttered, and Isabel half-shrugged, accepting that without approving it.

"So who're your friends?" the video game guy asked Alex promptingly.

"Oh, right, umm... this is Isabel Evans, my girlfriend." There was an appropriately impressed reaction from the new guy. "Kyle Valenti, a... a good friend." Somebody who didn't know a lot of the story already wouldn't have noticed the brief pause. "And Kyle's wife Tess." The surprised look on Tess' face at being introduced to somebody new in this way for the first time was great. "They just got married last night in a small wedding chapel - without really inviting any of us."

"Hmm, okay."

Isabel nudged Alex just hard enough to, apparently, make him remember that he'd forgotten one side of the introductions. "Oh, right. Guys, this is, umm... Peter Nae..." he trailed off uncertainly at that start into the last name.

"Navier," Peter finished. "Mind if I pull up a chair?" Tess and Isabel made almost identical 'go-ahead' gestures at the same moment. "So, you guys are all from Roswell huh? I came up from Oakland for the convention. And actually, the reason that I was looking for you, man, is... well, umm..."

"You were looking for me?" Alex exclaimed. "How did you know that we'd be... well, I guess we met here around the lobby here before. Sorry, I forgot that we weren't still over at the Texan place." Peter shot him a look. "It's been a big day."

"Actually, I wasn't looking for you specifically as such, more like the first few I happened to see out of a list of people I met," Peter admitted. "But anyway... I'm trying to round up a few players for this kind of computerized adventure game showcase." He considered. "Of course, if you have other things to do, then I guess I keep looking. I suppose there'd be room for all four of you to play, if you're all interested."

I shot a look over at Tess - she seemed interested but unsure. "What kind of game?" Isabel asked.

"Well, it's sort of a fantasy adventure-warfare thing," He said. "You start off running a small town surrounded by unexplored territory, and you recruit followers and send them out to explore, expand your territory, and fight the followers of other players. Kind of a mix between world of warcraft, stellar crisis, and empire."

Nobody said anything for a long moment. "Well, I'd really love to give that a try," Alex admitted, "and I think it'd be something fun to do together. We can all give it a try, and if anybody doesn't like it, then - umm, we can work out what to do them. Fair enough?" He looked over at Peter, and I realized that whoever was running the game might not be enthusiastic about a bunch of people coming in just to try it out and then leaving again. But Peter nodded, a bit reluctantly, but a smile on his face. Maybe he remembered what it was like to be a gaming newbie and not sure about diving into something so new.

The game was really pretty fun. I was lost for a little while, but managed to get my domain into shape just in time for a bunch of guys in purple to come hammering into me from the West. (Turns out later that Purple was Peter.) Nobody ended up leaving until the final confrontation was fought out between Alex and this grizzled old guy who looked like he should be complaining about computers as newfangled gadgets, not working them like a maestro. I'd gotten eliminated a little past the middle of the game, in a reasonably epic battle, with my golden sorcerers and golden paladins fighting valiantly to defend the last outposts of Kylesland against the dreaded white knights.

So we went back into the bar for one last nightcap, (just virgin drinks for the alien girls,) and up to the rooms. By this time I had remembered about Tess and Alex siwtching rooms, so I put my arm around Tess as we walked up the door and impulsively scooped her into my arms to carry her over the threshold.

"Um, thanks," Tess said. "Even if I was in here this morning, so it kinduv steps on the point." But when I put her down, she kissed me. "So, I guess that this is the second night of our honeymoon or something?"

"Well, yeah." There was a bit of awkwardness in the room. "We, umm, we don't have to do anything that you don't want to..."

"Don't even," Tess shot back, and I blinked in surprise. "Remember, you promised you'd catch me." And she threw herself into my embrace so hard it was almost like a tackle, (though I'd been tackled by people bigger than my hundred-nineteen pound wife.) So I caught her as well as I could, and we fell into the sexy fires of passion together.


	6. Chapter 6

The day after we all went to the Adventuredome, we mostly split up in couples and other tight groups. Tess had dragged me off to an open casting call for an episode of the Real World or some other reality show like that. (Yeah, like what any of us needed was for that girl to have cameras trained on her for several months, and producers looking for the juciest bits to play to a nationwide audience.) But it actually turned out to be pretty fun, and yeah, there's like a zero percent chance that we'll be picked for callbacks or anything, and if we blow _those_ off they'll just go to the next names on the list.

So the casting call was from nine in the morning to around quarter to two, and we grabbed late lunch at a pizza place, went into a casino for some more gambling fun, and ran into who else but Max and Liz. I was afraid that things would get awkward, but actually we ended up having a lot of fun at a blackjack table and betting on other people throwing craps. Both Max and Liz finished eight or nine hundred dollars ahead, and I was wondering if Tess was trying to push the dice in favor of their bets without letting either realize.

Now the whole gang had met up for dinner at a Manhattan themed diner - in fact, it looked a lot like the cliche hangout from 'Seinfeld', although nobody was using that name or Monk's or anything. The roast beef on rye was pretty good, but I wasn't that hungry, since it hadn't been that long ago that I ate seven slices of a pepperoni, bacon, and red pepper pie.

"Hmm, well, I wanna do something a bit wild tonight," Isabel said. "We don't have too long left here in Vegas."

"All of tomorrow," Max remarked with a sandwich nearly up to his lips, "and then we leave the day after."

"Taking off at the break of dawn probably," Maria added. "So that we can see Roswell again maybe before nightfall." She sighed. "Well, regardless of how the question of time left bears, I'm definitely up for something wild."

"Okay, any ideas for something wild?" I asked, looking around Tess' eyes were sparkling slightly, but she waited before volunteering. Isabel and Maria both shook their heads.

"Well, I got handed this while waiting in line in the morning," Tess finally said. From her back jeans pocket she extracted a small bit of folded paper, colored in a neon-bright pink, and started to open it up. The complete flyer was headlined '_X-treme Rave_ Action.'

"Oh, come on," Liz muttered. "I don't really want to be a wet blanket just because it's expected of me, like a designated driver, but - well, the soap factory party didn't really work out well for any of us."

"Speak for yourself," I joked. Tess shot me a look. Whoops - probably shouldn't be bragging about any action I got off of Vicky Delaney in front of the new ball and chain. "Umm, well..."

"I wasn't even there," Tess pouted. "And it's not like you guys were even in jail for long."

"Let me have a look at that," Michael suggested, and Tess passed the sheet over. "Okay, let's see... there's an address, or something like an address."

"Maybe we have to figure some of it out, like the euphoria party on 90210," Alex suggested. "Or Enigma."

"Could be," I admitted. "What else, Michael?" I hadn't taken a close look at this thing myself.

"Umm... no admittance without this sheet - not sure if that means that the one can get us all in or if we need to each have a flyer. Subject to approval..."

"So that the bouncer has last say about who's hot enough to get in," Alex sighed.

"Dress code - UW or SS ." Michael's forehead wrinkled a bit. "What do those stand for?"

"Hmm... I'm not sure," Maria admitted, looking over him. "For all of the x-tremeness of it, I'm not sure that it'd really be illegal just to show up or anything. May be some drug stuff going on, but I think that we'll be able to stay away."

"Well, I guess I'm in for trying to get in, at least," I admitted. "Should we try to find any more of those flyers or just hope that this one will do everybody."

"We look around," Max said. "Worst comes to worst, one person getting in is really no good. If we have two, or four - then some people can use them while the others find something else to do."

"Okay I guess," Liz said, smiling slightly. I guess that she was starting to come around to the idea of letting her principles down and just having crazy fun for one night - maybe. "Well, since Tess got the first, she should should be able to use it - which means that Kyle gets the next one I suppose."

"Thanks," I said. "And the address seems to be something south side-ish, which was where the casting call was too. Figures that that makes sense as a place to go hunting."

"Alright," Isabel said. "We go and look, and maybe try to find somebody who knows what the dress code thing means. Then go back to the hotel to change, if we need to."

"Maybe we should get some of the cars on the way," Alex put in. "We've done pretty well mostly on foot so far, but hurrying back and forth might eat up a lot of time."

"Sure, sounds good," Tess agreed. "The three-star is closer to here than where we're heading to, anyway."

"I wish that you wouldn't call it that, Tess," Michael groused.

"What? It's a three star hotel, Michael," she shot back. "That's pretty good, but..."

"Come on, less sniping and more finishing our dinners," Maria said.

"Yeah, that's good advice," Max added.

"I'm not going to be able to eat all of this beef," I decided unhappily, looking at the rye sandwich.

It wasn't too long before we were hurrying back towards the hotel. "I, umm... I think I know what the dress code thing means," Tess whispered, walking close in step next to me, so near that we were almost pressed against each other, but not quite, just our arms touching a bit.

"Umm, okay." I muttered. "Any reason you don't wanna share with the others?"

"Well - I **do** want everybody to come along." She giggled. "And that just might be more likely if they've invested more time and effort into the whole deal before finding out!"

"Hmm..." Considered that. "Well, don't let Liz realize that you were holding out on her - and what's the big secret?" I was wondering why Tess thought that anybody might bail out if they found out about this too soon, and if the 'investing time and effort' thing would really make that much difference if it was really bad.

"Underwear or swimsuits," she sort of breathed at me - or it might have been just a thought that she sent along, though I think that she at least mouthed the words. Ohh... I started to see the point. A little bit risque to say the least, sexy without going overboard - which was probably the point, from the point of view of the club. Thought about Liz having to take off some of her clothes and go nearly naked to go inside - and I nearly tripped over my own feet. Okay, don't think about that so hard. "Hmm... maybe it'd be a good thing if they found out before actually getting to the club, instead of having her find out there. Some of the girls could change and wear one-piece bathing suits under their clothes, if that makes them feel more comfortable."

"Hmm." Tess considered that. "But wouldn't that be less fun?" I looked over, not quite sure what to make of the smile on her face. I didn't think that she had a lecherous interest in any of the other ladies in the group - so was there some sort of humilation impulse going on? Could Tess be trying to maneuver Liz into having to get into a situation that she would be uncomfortable with? I wasn't sure how well that would work even if she had it in mind - Liz would back out of the deal rather than go through with something if she were really embarrassed with it, and Max at least would support her in that decision. And if Tess did like the idea of humiliating her sometime rival... what did I think about that? I was pretty sure that Tess had let go of whatever she felt for Max - but was there still any bitterness over her rivalry with Miss Parker?

I tried to put that part of it out of my mind. No sense worrying about it before I needed to, after all. "Hmm... and what might you be wearing to the rave?" I asked her, still keeping my voice low. We were hanging something like fifteen feet behind the others.

"You have to ask?" she teased. "Don't you remember what underwear I put on today? I saw you watching me."

"Ohh." Flashback hit me. Lacy pink bra and bikini panties, not really skimpy - which was to say, I was not quite willing to start a fight over the prospect of her going into a club dressed only that much and parading around in such a fashion in front of strangers. They'd definitely show off a lot of skin, though... creamy, soft smooth skin...

Well, I didn't manage to say much coherent for most of the walk to the hotel.

Driving around the south side of the strip area looking for pink flyers, (or any other color of flyers that the same club might have printed out for that event) was actually some kind of fun. I bought one off of a sixteen year old canadian boy for forty bucks, (not like the money was something I was worried about for the moment,) by pressing hard on the fact that the bouncer would probably confiscate it and not let him in anyway. Maria managed to retrieve one that had been folded up and tucked behind one of those metal bands around a street lamp. Just as she was showing it to the rest of us, Liz rushed up and told everybody what the UW & SS meant.

"Hmm." Isabel thought about that. "Well, I'll need to go change back at the hotel at least - I'm wearing a thong, and that might be a problem." Michael shot Alex a look - maybe I did too.

"So you're going through with it?" Maria asked Isabel and Alex, who nodded. "What about you guys?"

"Yeah, umm, I think so," I said.

"Of course, unless we get a fourth flyer, we might not be able to..."

"Oh, that's another thing," Liz mentioned. "The girl who told me about that - she also mentioned that if we charm the bouncer a little, we should be able to get two people in for each flyer. That's, umm, I guess that's three couples so far." She sighed, and turned to Max. "Maybe we should just leave it at that, and go and find something less wild and crazy together. Scalp tickets for one of the big theater shows or something."

Max smiled slightly. "If, if you don't wanna go that's okay with me. But - but if you're just feeling a bit nervous, and uncertain about whether we can find a fourth 'ticket', then - then I say that we should at least try for it." Liz smiled a bit too. "We've got maybe fifteen minutes before anybody needs to drive back to the hotel. That's enough time to see..."

"Hey, you looking for another of these?" Somewhat disbelieving, most of us turned around to see a kid around our own age, late teens anyway, (though his ID probably said he was over 21 just like all of ours,) with frizzy bright red hair waving a pink sheet in our direction. "I scored an extra."

Liz stared him down for a moment. "Umm, yeah maybe, why?" she asked. "You offering it for free or selling?"

"Hmm... don't need money," he admitted, looking at Liz, "but I wouldn't mind a thank you. Say, maybe, one french kiss?"

"Oh, brother," Maria said. "Come on, let the creep take two of himself into the club if he wants to. We'll find another."

"They'll be going fast," carrot-top taunted us. "Eight of you, and I think I see three tickets. Some are going to have to stay behind..."

"That's it," Liz said. "I don't even want to..."

All of a sudden Max was in motion, crossing the distance to the red-headed boy in a few steps. "Here's how it works. You're not getting _any_ kind of kiss." Calmly he plucked the spare flyer out of the other guy's hand. I could tell that he had been trying to grip it harder, to pull his arm behind his back, to run away, to punch Max in the face, but none of that was working. Max was using alien powers on the boy somehow, to freeze him in the spot. Afterwards, he would think that he'd just choked out of surprise. "Thank you, *very much," Max drawled sarcastically, stepping slowly back with his prize. "Now get going."

Red-head staggered slightly, when Max's control of his legs let up, and seemed to be weighing his chances of rushing Max and getting the flyer back, or at least making him regret taking it. But Michael was stepping up next to his best friend, doing his best to look strong and dangerous, which didn't really take much, and I decided to do my bit at the intimidation thing too. Even Isabel was shooting him a dangerous, 'mess with my brother and I'll make you regret it' look. He walked down the sidewalk away from us, grumbling under his breath.

"You, you didn't need to," Liz muttered. "I mean, I'm still not sure if I even want to..."

"Just go back to the hotel and pick out an outfit," Max suggested, smiling. "If you don't want to go through with it after that, then that's fine. We can try to catch Spamalot at the Alladin, or something."

So we trooped back to the cars and headed up to our rooms at the hotel. Tess was insistent about not changing from the pink underthings that she had on, but she slipped into the bathroom for a quick shower anyway and put on a simple white sheath dress, presumably thinking that it'd be easy to take off, leave in the car, and put back on again when we came out. I went over all of my options and settled on a fairly baggy and thick pair of boxers, underneath a t-shirt and baggy army pants. Wondered if a guy would be able to make a case that a wife-beater was 'an undershirt' and thus allowable, but didn't bother putting one on myself, since I didn't feel any particular uncertainty about going bare-chested. Pretty sure that Tess likes my pecs, after all, and anyone else can just kiss off if they don't - or if they like them too much for my wife to approve.

It was pretty weird gathering back up again, and wondering what everybody else had on underneath their clothes. Figured that we'd find out soon enough.

The club was, well, I wasn't quite sure what to make of the ugly squat building on first glance. There was loud rap-rock coming from inside it, and spinning colored lights set up outside the door, presumably meant to be eye-catching, and an odd incense-ey smell coming from inside. The bouncer wasn't as muscular and wide as I usually expect them to be, though he was certainly tall, maybe six foot seven, with mid-dark skin and an exotic quality to his face. "Greetings. Your invitations, please?"

Tess stood up, holding my hand, and passed over her original invite. (I'd passed the one I bought over to Alex, after Liz said that each one would be good for two.) The bouncer considered both of us, and then the group as a whole. "None of you are dressed appropriately."

"We are too," Tess shot back. "Just wearing a few extra things to look more street legal." Bouncer raised an eyebrow at her.

"It's underwear or swimming things, right?" I blurted out. Might as well get the facts from an authorized source, even though the reference on the flyers seemed pretty clear and had been confirmed by a total stranger. Bouncer-man nodded.

"Come on, let's not waste time," Isabel muttered, pulling her sweater off. At various rates, the rest of us followed her lead, and I took a look at the other six without being obvious about it. Michael was wearing swimming trunks, Max had gone for boxers as well as a very unmistakable undershirt, (not really a wifebeater,) and Alex was dressed up in what sortof looked like a pair of oddly short-legged and sleeveless grandpa pajamas. (Whatever.)

With the girls, it was harder to force myself not to stare. Hey, they're all very attractive ladies, aren't they? Isabel was wearing a black spandex top that seemed like a cross between a snug sports bra and half of a swimsuit, along with blue bottoms that reminded me of wonder woman's outfit oddly. (No, they didn't have little white or yellow stars on them.) Liz had a red bustier bra, and matching boy-cut underwear or something like that, and Maria had gone with a light blue silk slip or something like that, possibly with yet another layer under it. Bouncer-man looked over the group, and then decided to return his attention to Tess and I. "Ten dollar cover, per head."

"You're crazy - at least tell me something like that while I'm still wearing something with damn _pockets_!" Tess shot at him. Bouncer just shrugged slightly, and I wondered for just an odd moment about his ancestry. Oriental wth a bit of african mixed in, or something unusual like that? Tess leveled her most intense stare at him, and I realized that she wasn't just using human charm at this point. Occasionally, when things have been dire, she's been able to sort of Jedi-mind-trick someone, from what I can tell - persuade them to decide something that she wants decided, though it doesn't work on anything that the target minds would resist very strongly. "No cover. For _any_ of us."

There was a long, silent, moment, and Max covered a gasp, probably because he couldn't believe that Tess was using a mind control power when it wasn't a life or death situation. Then bouncer shook his head, just like my Dad sometimes does when he knows that he's letting me talk him into something that he shouldn't go along with. "Okay, no cover, but only because you and your girlfriends look so damn hot. Good for business."

"Why, you're such a big sweetie," Tess flirted back, and when the bouncer stepped away slightly she led me into the club. There was a sort of a small vestibule or welcoming hall just inside, including a clothes check-in desk - not like a usual coat check, because instead of hangers they had shelves and shelves full of big wire baskets. Sort of like the deal in the big county rec center pool changing rooms, which sort of made sense in that the objective is essentially the same. Tess had taken my clothes and handed them, and hers, over to Maria, so I wasn't sure if somebody would take them back to the cars, or if they'd be brought inside.

There were a few vending machines here too, and doors with the men's and ladies' icons, and some chairs and benches. That was about it - further inside the club we could see a big dance floor, though it wasn't terribly easy to make out what was going on there between the incense fumes, the flashing lights, and something else that seemed to be obscuring the air. There would have to be a bar, or more than one, but I couldn't spot it immediately. Tess was pulling me towards the action, and had just realized that I was hanging back. "What the hell?"

"We wait here," I said to her, in a whispering tone that was loud enough to be heard - which meant it was probably about the same volume as a regular speaking voice outside. "The rest of our friends haven't gotten past the bouncer yet. It's just common decency to hold up."

"Hmm." Tess turned to look at me, and there was a slightly eerie flash reflecting in the side of her eyes from the dance floor. "Now, would you really do that if it weren't for me, or are you just bending over backward to have me be 'nice' to Liz and Maria and Alex?"

"Umm... I'm not sure," I admitted. Trying to place a situation where I'd be coming in here *without* Tess took a bit of mental reorganization time, and before I'd finished and gotten my answer ready someone else came up behind us.

"Hey guys, what are you doing just waiting around here?" Maria asked. I cringed and avoided meeting Tess' eyes. "Oooh - clothes check. I'll go and stash our stuff." Well, that answered one question. I turned to look at Maria waiting behind some other guy to get her bundle put away, and realized that my eyes were being drawn to her rear end underneath the slip. Oooh boy, this was going to be tough.

"My other half here, insisted on waiting for everybody," Tess was saying to Michael on my other side.

"Hmm... doesn't suck as a plan," Michael admitted. Tess groaned. "And here comes more of everybody." It was Max and Liz this time.

"Come _on_!" Tess tugged at me again. She'd have been tugging at my sleeve, except that I didn't have any sleeves at this point. "He's not going to keep Isabel out - not looking like she does."

"He might be trying to talk Isabel to coming in without Alex, much as I hate to say it," Maria admitted. She had stepped back from the check desk, clipping some kind of a numbered clip to the neckline of her slip - presumably that was the claim receipt for our clothes, so I definitely supported her not losing it. Max and Liz hadn't carried their stuff in - would Isabel and Alex bring theirs? Or had *they* gone back to the car?

"Umm. okay, okay, I'm coming," I grunted, finally reaching the end of my rope with my lovely wife's impatience. Nobody else seemed to mind us heading off to dance, so I would probably have been making too much out of nothing if I'd insisted on staying around. This way, I wouldn't get to see Isabel make her entrance, though.

But I *would* be able to find out for sure what was weird about the dance floor, though. That strange visual cue was getting stronger as we approached, and I was thinking that soon it would be clear what was causing it. I got a surprise as we stepped through the threshold, though, and some of what was causing landed on us.

"What the heck?" I asked. "They've got sprinklers on, on top of everything else? Isn't that pushing things a bit too far?"

"I, I dunno," Tess admitted, shaking her hips back and forth just a little. My eyes darted over, drawn by a momentary change, and I realized that a drop had landed on her bra, right where her nipple must be, though it wasn't clearly visible even with that moisture. "There's something exotic about it, and something oddly natural. Like dancing in the rain." She pulled me next to her, and our bodies orbited in close pathways. "What's bugging you?"

"Umm... I'm not sure," I admitted. There were the lights, which were even more distracting from here, and the smell - not just incense, but the smell of hundreds of sweaty and somewhat excited young people - and Tess' aroma was strong enough to be definitely noticeable even among the hundreds. "The floor is kinduv a puzzler, for one thing."

"The floor?" She pouted cutely, trying to sort that out. "What's so weird about that?"

"It seems perfectly dry." I'd put my shoes on after taking off my pants, and Tess had never even taken hers off, but as far as I could tell, the dancing surface was easy to get a footing on, and didn't seem to have any moisture at all on it. Of course, that didn't really add up with the fact that there was so much moisture coming down from above, but... "How do they manage that?"

"Hmm..." Tess considered. "One of us could examine it in more detail."

"Well-" Thought about that, and which one of us should bend over in underwear. "Maybe I don't care that much." I swung her around.

Tess giggled, but closed her eyes and seemed to be only moving very unimaginatively, as if something else was on her mind than dancing, for several seconds. Then she leaned close to whisper to me. "There are a few drops on the floor, but they seem to evaporate very quickly, and there's something slightly sticky about the coating that cancels out the slick effect from a little moisture I think."

"How - how do you know th..." I cut myself off. Maybe she'd been able to use her powers to probe the floor without actually inspecting it visually. "I, I said that I didn't care."

Tess blinked. "Oh, sorry - I guess I just assumed that you didn't want me to..."

"I care about _this_," I said, and bent down slightly to kiss her. Everything else in this club had been stimulating me, and the passion I felt for my young bride was much too much to contain any more. Tess made an approving noise deep in her chest, and her slippery self seemed to melt into my arms.

When we finally managed to stumble off of the dance floor, Tess' hair was delightfully mussed, and - well, my shorts were wet with more than just sprinkles of water, and I didn't care. Somebody called us over to a table well away from the bar - it turned out to be Isabel and Alex.

"Hey," Tess declared. "Haven't you two tried dancing yet?"

"Nah, I wanted to, but there doesn't seem to be much room out there," Isabel pointed out. Hmm... neither of us had especially noticed the crowding, but maybe we don't need as much space as taller people like Isabel and Alex.

"What're you drinking?" I asked.

"Nothing too special," Alex admitted. "Root beer and pink grapefruit juice. Care to join us? There's plenty of space."

I shared a look with Tess. It seemed a bit weird to be spending time with the rest of the gang under this dress code. Was better with just Tess and I.

"Well, we'll wait in line for drinks of our own, and then see," she said diplomatically.

"Alright, cya."

#

By the time we got back to the room, I could hardly restrain myself. (This despite the fact that we'd been fooling around at the club, and in the backseat on the ride home - or maybe because of it, I'm never really sure.) Tess led the way in first, and I followed her, closed the door, and pretty much ripped her dress open again. She looked down at the by-now-familiar underthings that were revealed, and then her eyes flashed as she looked back up at me. Blue eyes, blue underwear... somehow that just made everything hotter. And I rushed towards her, finally pulling the bra off, which I'd been tempted to do pretty much ever since she stripped down to it in front of the bouncer, but had been restraining myself mostly because I didn't want anybody else to see her breasts - especially, in an odd way, Max.

Hmm... I guess I'm not the only one with some leftover rivalry issues. As far back as I realized how attracted I was to Tess, I could also tell that there was some weird connection between them, and that Tess wanted him. But now I have her, if only for a little while maybe, and I don't really want Evans to get too good a look at what he's missing out on.

Tess squealed softly with pleased anticipation and pulled me down on top of her, so that her body was trapped between mine and the bed. I brought my lips down to her chin and dragged them across the smooth skin of her throat, as she employed her own talents to strip off my pants without using her hands. I continued straight on down, leaving a trail of kisses all the way through her cleavage, down her flat waist past Tess' belly button, and started to pull her panties away from her pussy and down her legs. I threw them away, managing to hook the little blue fabric on the bathroom doorknob, and just then she pulled my recharged rocket out of my bozers and moistened her lips with a pretty pink tongue. That combination of actions just paralyzed me instantly, and Tess maneuvered my body around as if I were a Ken doll, sitting me on the edge of the bed and kneeling at my feet. Oh, isn't that an oddly hot image - blowjob Barbie, heheh. And Tess giggled in what was actually a slightly ditsy sounding way as she bent her head down and licked at the head of my pecker, twirling around a bit in a spiraly pattern.

Once again, I'm invoking spousal privilege to keep from going into all the details of what happened in our hotel room that night, but you have to understand that an awful lot of different sex acts were at least tried out over the next two hours, and most of them were fulfilled to at least one of our satisfaction, if not both. Drowsily, the two of us lying next to each other, mostly under a single sheet with the blankets piled up at the foot of the giant bed, Tess muttered, "It - umm, it seems weird now that we're married. Not that - well, that I've done most of things before getting married, but - well, you did more than I did..."

"I guess," I admitted, running a hand through Tess' curls. (The ones on her head, not anything else you might have guessed. Actually, she - no, never mind.) "Haven't done all of that before. And - well, I guess it's hard for me to say if it's different because we're married. Having sex with you - it's different because it's you, and because I love you. I..." I might have thought that I loved the girls that I was with at the time, before this, or maybe not. Definitely it wasn't really possible to compare now to how I felt with anyone else before this, unless it was how I felt about Tess a year ago. But I wasn't quite sure how to explain any of that.

"I know," she said, and I wasn't quite sure if she was talking about the thoughts that were running through my head, or the last thing I'd said out loud. Then she got one of those cute and mischievous looks on her face. "Well, there's some stuff that we did before we got married, and then after. Was there any difference there?"

"Hmm." I thought about that. "Not really - I mean, well, any two blowjobs are going to be different, in different circumstances and slightly different technique choices or whatever. But I wouldn't say that there was enough of a difference to be commented on."

"Hmmph." Tess sounded disappointed with that. "Well, I - umm, I want to try nearly everything with you, now." She sighed. "Some things just seem too weird, maybe they're just not my preference or what-have-you." She sighed. "In a weird way, even though I decided not to have sex before this - well, there are some sex acts that almost sound like they're too wild for married people to try."

"Ehh, I dunno about that," I said, reaching up to nuzzle her ear. "Married people just aren't supposed to _admit_ that they still go wild in the bedroom." I was struggling with a self-destructive urge to say something about how she wanted to try 'nearly everything' with me, and if we'd have time before having to leave Vegas in less than thirty-six hours. Divorce had become an unspoken concept by mutual agreement, and I really didn't want to do anything to break my side of it. The more Tess wanted to talk and act as if we had all the time in the world - maybe she'd get used to going the distance that way, or start to realize what we'd be missing out on by signing the papers.

"I was thinking about college earlier today," Tess said, wrapping one arm around me. "Is there any way you could go back to the University of New Mexico and see if they can find any scholarship money for you? I mean - you told them no, true, but I'm sure that they want a good running back still, and..."

"It's - it's a good idea," I said, "and it might work. But - well, there are two possible problems with it. One, there's only a limited amount of scholarship money in the budget of any university, and most of it has probably been either promised out or is being reserved for courting specific star athletes who are still, in effect, keeping multiple schools on the line." Tess made a half-nod. "Also, they've probably made certain decisions about the makeup of their freshman team positions..."

"Yeah, umm, I get it," Tess said, a trace of sourness creeping into her voice. "They might have gone ahead, since you weren't available, and offered scholarship money to some other runner back, who's not quite as great as you... or maybe even one who's a little bit better *on the field**..." I chuckled at the way that she'd put that. "And so they don't need you quite so much anymore."**

**"Yeah." I sighed. "Well, we'll see what we can do about that." If you **don't* serve me with divorce papers. Unsaid.

#

"Okay, we've got to do something really cool on our last full day," Tess said the next morning after breakfast. Everybody was splitting up again, which suited me fine. But I wasn't quite sure how to fit her criteria of 'really cool.'

"Umm - go see the white tigers?" I hazarded once the pause had gotten sufficiently long.

Tess mulled that over judiciously. "Actually yeah, that has potential." She considered. "We'll walk there, wherever it is, so that in case something better comes along, we'll be free to go for it."

"Alright," I admitted. "Hope that's not the way you approach everything in life. 'In case something else better comes along...'"

She sighed and shook her head. "Not - not when it comes to important stuff like who I love. I... I thought that you'd be able to tell things like that."

"Yeah, I guess I do," I admitted. "It was a stupid thing to say."

"Yeah, well - I guess I know you well enough that you do that occasionally," she teased, smiling as we headed out of the hotel lobby. "Alright, guess that's the cue for more sharing time." I laughed at how she put it. "Do you ever talk much to those guys from the jock squad that you were such good friends with before the alien abyss took over your life?"

"Hmmm." I considered that. "Not sure that we were ever the kind of friends who ever _talked_ much - about important stuff, at least, or anything that I'd consider important now. Every few weeks I spend a night out or a weekend afternoon with some of those guys, and things are pretty much the same as they ever were. They're okay people to have some fun with - most of the time with. Occasionally the jock group mentality adds up to something that doesn't exactly equal fun - like beating Max up. I think that you heard about that one a bit."

"Hmm, yeah," Tess agreed. "Just out of curiosity - were you completely against the idea of giving Max a beat-down, or just upset that they'd gone behind your back to do it?"

"Oh boy," I laughed. "Umm... let's see... yeah, if the circumstances had been a bit different, I might have suggested something of the sort. But - well, I hadn't mostly because I guess I knew on some level that it'd get back to Liz if we did that, and she'd probably feel sympathetic for Max and not be very impressed with me starting something - especially if I used the guys for backup. So, when they did it on their own, and I caught the heat... that was mostly what I was upset about, yeah." I sighed. "Do you think of anybody who isn't 'in the know' as a friend?"

"Hmm... well, Missus DeLuca, definitely," Tess said after a moment. I smiled - she might not be out of the loop for much longer, but that was another story. "As far as people my own age - I dunno... maybe Wanda Lively."

"Wanda?" I repeated, trying to match the name to a face. "The girl with really short dark hair who you were studying for English lit with last week?"

"Yeah, that's her." Tess sighed. "She's not someone I'm really close with, but I'm comfortable spending some time with her, and occasionally we talk about random stuff." She sighed. "Friendships have to start somewhere, huh?"

"I guess so." Pause. "What kind of random stuff?"

"Oh, families, though I have to keep my mouth pretty closed on that one. Classes, hopes for the future." Pause. "Guys."

"Hmm... does she have a boyfriend?"

"Yeah, she's pretty tight with Ralph Worley."

"Ralph?"

"He's kinduv short, light brown hair, really deep brown eyes. On the math club and newspaper." I made a little 'ahh' sound. "Yeah, maybe he fits the 'nerd' stereotype a little. but she really likes him a lot."

"Cool for them both I suppose. So - did you tell Wanda about any guys in particular that _you_ liked?"

"Oh, boy." Tess shoved me playfully. "Yeah, most of what I've been talking about when we got on the subject was that I liked you and wasn't sure what to do about it, since you dumped me the first time we tried dating." She whistled. "Wow, I wonder what she'll think when she hears - you know."

"A bunch of people might be surprised," I admitted. "When it comes to that breakup - umm, do you still feel any, umm, leftover..."

"I'm not holding a grudge about it, no," Tess volunteered, and I let out a relieved breath. "Maybe... you got the idea that my heart wasn't completely with you by that point, that I was still holding on to the things that I felt for Max, and didn't want to have to share me with him?"

"Yeah, I - uhh, I guess that describes it really well." Tess nodded knowingly. "Okay, umm - I guess it's your question again if there's something that you want to ask."

"Hmm... were we keeping count?"

"Something like, I was," I said. "One big 'getting to know more about you', along with a few follow ups per turn."

"Cool I guess." Tess took a few more steps. "Except that I'm not sure I can think of one."

"That's okay."

"Okay... What would you like to do when you grow up, if anything involving professional sports isn't possible?"

"Hmm." Now that one I kind of had to mull over. Mostly I'd just been worrying about getting out of high school and into college, assuming that things would sort themselves out that way. Maybe, just possibly, taking a sports scholarship and playing college football wasn't the best way of going about that. I tried to think of the things that I liked doing that might possibly lead to a career. "Hmm... well, I definitely don't want to follow dad into law enforcement or anything like that. Maybe - umm, I could probably make a try out of business management or sales, that sort of thing."

"Well, you can be very persuasive when you want to." Tess thought a moment. "Dammit, _now_ I remember what I wanted to ask this time around."

"You do?" I laughed. "Well, you can - I won't mind. What is it?"

"How exactly did you arrive at Buddhism? Was it a silent thing, looking through a number of different alternatives out of books, or some other kid talking to you about it?"

I laughed. "Yeah, there was another boy who 'got me into it', though he wasn't witnessing or anything - in fact, Jaspin always seemed really embarrassed when I asked him questions. I guess - well, he mentioned something out of a koan once when we were talking about drills, and the other guys wouldn't let up until he said where it was from..."

#

To set the scene - this bit coming up was late afternoon-ish, maybe twenty after four or so. We were in the middle of another casino - which one I had lost track of.

"You're just like your father sometimes! Never willing to bend an inch!" Tess flared at me, turning around and shoving me slightly.

"Yeah, well, maybe you should be grateful for that about him - and me," I shot back. "If my dad hadn't agreed to look after you guys and stood by that, you could be in a lot of trouble. And I've stuck by what I've decided, to support you and your friends, as well. When there were people pushing me to walk away and not look back. Don't you have any appreciation for that? Or only when it doesn't inconvenience you?"

"Okay, yes, I'm grateful for the loyalty that you and your family have shown me," Tess muttered grudgingly. "That goes without saying, though I'll keep reminding you of it if that's important. But that's not what I'm talking about. There's a difference between being a stand-up guy and refusing to bend an inch, if you'll excuse the analogy."

"I don't see that it's that big a distinction," I insisted. "There are things that I've been more than willing to compromise on, to sacrifice, and I've made that _very_ clear to you. To make this marriage work. But some things are just black and white, and I don't get why you're acting personally offended about the idea that..."

"Yeah," Tess insisted. "You just don't get it!"

"Oh, come on, you don't get to act annoyed with _me_ about this..." Part of the problem was that what we were really arguing about was something that we just couldn't say out loud in this venue - the cheating part. Tess had used her alien bippity-boppety-boo at a poker table. Somehow that crossed a line to me that Tess didn't see. I had no really great issues with attempting to defraud the casino - it was a big faceless corporation, that was trying to get money from the tourist rubes any way that it could, and playing by its own rules however it needed to... like the 'no counting cards' thing at blackjack that I've never really understood, partly since the definition of just what makes up card counting is never really clear until the casino pit boss rules that you've been doing it...

Sorry, if I get on a roll about that we'll be there all day. Cheating some other guy sitting at the table seems like an entirely different thing, though. If he would have won the money fairly by the deal of the cards, and the skill of his play, then who are we to take the pot just because Tess can shuffle molecules? Maybe whoever it was really needed the cash, to save his house, or give a kid a better life by sending him or her to a good college.

"And why the hell not?" Tess screamed. "I... I'm sorry, I shouldn't have... have said that - I guess it's just hard for me to talk to you when things get like this." She spun on her heel.

"Please - please don't turn away from me right now," I said, in a harder tone than I meant to. Tess hesitated, and then stepped away further instead of facing me again. I groaned out loud, and she stepped up to one of those nickel slots, fumbling a coin out of her purse and feeding it in. I was curious about why she'd do something like that, until she pulled the lever down, which she did with a sharp, vigorous motion, and then it made sense - she'd have slammed a door on me if there was one around, but there weren't any doors, and somehow that yank was the closest worthwhile alternative that she'd hit on immediately.

But unlike slamming a door, this didn't keep me from running up to her. "Come on... I - I'm sorry if I was being too harsh. We - we can talk things through, right?" I ran a hand along her forearm. "Sitting here and playing the slots doesn't change anything..."

And then I was cut off by the way the slot machine was flashing and blaring some sort of music. Huh, had she actually won something? But no coins were coming out of the payoff slot. Tess was staring at it, shock on her face. On the face of the thing, three gold bar icons were showing. Okay, yeah, looked like that was a win. "Okay, how much is that worth?"

"Umm... I think nearly a hundred and twenty thousand," Tess breathed. "If it's the jackpot that I think it is." And suddenly, she turned to me with a look of panic on her face. "Kyle, I didn't... didn't mean to do that!"

"Oh, boy," I muttered. "Hope our fake IDs are good enough for this."


	7. Chapter 7

"So, that's it?" Tess asked the jackpot flunky. "It's this easy to collect the money?"

"No reason why it shouldn't be, Miss Harding," the flunky replied. "You played the slot, you have the jackpot ticket that was issued. Your identification checks out, certifying that you're at the legal gambling age in the state of Nevada." Both of us smiled a bit weakly at that, but not weakly enough that he noticed. "Do you mind if I ask what you want to do with the money?"

"Umm... maybe spend it on a trip for a honeymoon, or a nice place to stay together."

The flunky paused for just a moment, and actually looked at me for the first time since Tess had presented the winner's slip. "Oh... are the two of you newlyweds?"

"Yeah, actually," I admitted, and reached out a hand to put it on Tess' arm, just below her elbow.

"You know, Rachel Reid from the 'Review-Journal' has been doing a series of stories on big winners. You guys would fit great into the piece, I can just tell. Is there any chance that you'd like to do an interview..."

"No, sorry," Tess blurted out. "I mean, things are probably going to be crazy enough when we get home without knowing that we'll be in the paper. Yeah, I know it won't be in the paper at home, but still... we're not talking to the press."

"Hmm, alright I guess. Sorry to hear about it. Well, let's see about getting you that check."

Max was not at all happy when he found out what had happened, which was late that evening as we were all getting ready for sleeping away our last night in Vegas. "Some - someone is going to recheck it eventually," he growled low to Tess. "The faked IDs are fine for casual gambling, but if they crosscheck with records back in Roswell, they'll find only one Tess Harding, who is only eighteen!"

"Yeah Max, I know, I know," she said. "But I keep telling you, I never meant to win the jackpot. What was I going to do after that? Refuse to even take the winner slip? Incinerate it with my powers? Go and tell that guy that I wasn't old enough, straight out? All of that would have been immediately suspicious."

Max didn't seem particularly impressed with Tess' line of reasoning, but at that point Liz waved at him from across the lobby, and all of a sudden he seemed disinclined to argue any more. (Funny how well that works on us guys.)

As we were drifting off to sleep that night, I whispered at Tess, "Are you serious about using the money for us, sweetie? I mean, that cash could solve some of the problems that are looming in the future of this marriage."

Tess sighed sleepily. "Money doesn't solve problems, Kyle, at least not the tough ones. Sure, we could use the jackpot check to pay off tuition, get an off campus apartment or something. But the basic issue of how much either of us is willing to personally sacrifice for the other will just pop up later if we don't settle it now." I felt soft lips planted on my cheek, which was implausible given the way I was spooning her - a friendly little illusion. "And there's one other problem coming up, that we can't solve by throwing money at it."

"What?" I said, and then realized that I could guess. "Oh, you mean telling my Dad?" Silent nod. "Yeah, I guess that's an issue at least. But... well, we go back home, he probably sees the rings right off, and we tell him what happened. That's not a problem. A problem could start with the way he reacts, but we can cross that bridge once we're sure there's a river."

"Kyle honey?"

"Yeah?"

"Just go to sleep," Tess muttered. I took the hint and shut up.

#

The next morning, after breakfast and checking out of the rooms, Maria insisted on having us all gather at the crappy little casino next door to our bargain hotel. Leading the way to a twenty dollar blackjack table, she said, "Okay, one deal, or whatever you call it. Each couple plays together. Got it?"

"Fine, I guess." There was something a bit odd about this, so I brought Tess to the last spot, so that all the others would have to play before us. Michael and Maria got a pair of aces.

"Oooh, cool, we can split," Michael said with a big grin.

Maria whacked him. "No, come on! Any other time, fine, but not for this. _No_ splitting."

"But two aces is... okay, fine." Michael sighed. Was this some sort of weird fortune telling thing, predicting the future by the luck of the cards? With Maria's approval, Michael hit a few times, getting a queen, (which made him scowl,) and then a nine, staying at twenty.

Alex and Isabel got a hard nineteeen, and were quite happy to stick with that.

Max and Liz got a four and a seven, and against the dealer's five they decided to double down, getting a nine.

Tess and I got a twelve to start with, looked at each other for a long time, and asked for a hit. Six for eighteen. Stayed there.

The dealer turned over a three next to his five, and then dealt a king. "House has eighteen," he said, paying off the others and giving us our money back.

So that was it. Michael and Maria refuse to split and end up winning, Alex and Isabel win easy, Max and Liz go double or nothing and win big. Tess and I... we just break even.

Well, it could've been worse.

#

The drive back home to Roswell went okay, nothing too interesting to report. All of our friends insisted on juggling the seating arrangements so that Tess and I could be alone in one car - Isabel was riding with Max and Liz in the Jeep, Alex with Michael and Maria in the Jetta, so that we had Tess' car to ourselves.

I know that I should've been happy about that. I would've thought I'd be ecstatic to be coming home still married, and with divorce apparently off the table for now - at least it hadn't been mentioned in a day or so, and then Tess had said she wasn't particularly thinking of it anymore. But all of the issues that surrounded going back to Roswell still seemed to weigh heavy on us.

"Okay, might as well ask," Tess said once we were about ninety miles into Arizona. "What do you think for the sleeping arrangements, right away?"

"Well... I guess that we share the bedroom," I said, surprised by the question. "My old bed is big enough that we can both use it I think." Tess stayed silent, so I continued. "I'll move some of my stuff in at a time, until we get too crowded, and then work out what's next from there."

She flashed a dense smile. (Don't ask me exactly how a smile is dense, but this one was. Impenetrable, even.) "Okay, that's good enough. You wanna ask one now?"

Ask one what? A question about what we'd do now that we were married? "Okay, umm... what college do you want to try for together?"

"Well, umm... I'm pretty sure that we both got into State at Santa Fe," she pointed out. "It's a quality school, close enough to drive home and see Dad, or some of the old gang if they're within range, but far enough away to start our own life without him. Sound alright?"

I thought about it. State New Mexico had a very broad range of athletic programs, some interesting courses on world religion, and one of the best business development programs in the Southwest. "Yeah, that works for me. And we can use Arizona as a backup in case something doesn't work out there."

"Yeah, fine."

I don't remember that much of the ride home in detail, though it seems like we were each talking non-stop. Our route mostly followed the north and then the east edges of the state of Arizona, before cutting into New Mexico. Stopped off at a small cantina around two in the afternoon to grab some sort of a spicy bean concoction and sodas to drink. The sun was down by the time we got back into Roswell, and without interrupting her story about Michael's tour as Santa Claus, she headed towards the old Valenti homestead.

Dad was waiting in the living room when we came in. "Hey, how was work?" Tess asked. Ever since last summer or so, Dad has been trying to drum up work as an independent private eye, which I know sounds like the premise for some family-rated TV show with a lot of heart and elements of film noir, but at least it usually gets the bills paid - after the second notices come in.

"Not bad," he said. "Actually, I've been off in Texas for most of the time you guys were gone - child abduction case. So, how was Sin City this ti-"

Neither of us had made a point of showing him the rings, but that was about as long as Dad took to notice. Hey, he was a really good cop, trained to observe and notice the significance of little things. "It's good to be back Dad," Tess said after a moment, when she was sure that he'd already gotten the point. That was very significant - in all the time that she'd been staying here, even when we were briefly dating, Tess has never called my father that - well, she tried a few times, but took it back because it was 'too weird'. Apparently, now that he actually was her father-in-law, that made it fit in her mind.

"You... you got married?"

There didn't seem to be anything to say to that other than "Yep." At least, all my smart aleck responses didn't seem appropriate for this situation.

"And just how drunk were you?"

"Not drunk enough that we don't remember it perfectly well," Tess said. "Kyle had had a few. Me, well, I'd had a sip a while back - by mistake, but it had probably worn off by the wedding."

"And were you drinking 'by mistake' too, Kyle?" Dad asked. I groaned, not wanting to get into a discussion about teenage drinking and legal minimum ages at that point.

"There's - there's something else you need to know, Mister V," Tess said. Hmm, maybe the 'Dad' thing wasn't sticking for good even yet. "It's about..."

"I, I told you, if there was anything to know about gambling, then I don't want to..."

"You **need** to know," Tess said, and sat down. I took a place next to her on the couch, holding her hand in mine, and after a moment Dad sighed, pulled up a chair, and made a 'give it to me' gesture. Tess told him what had happened with the slot machine, not going into any other detail about the gambling and cheating we had engaged in while in Vegas, but making no bones about the fact that she had a fake ID on her that listed her as 21.

"Oh, boy," Dad muttered. "And you couldn't show the genuine one, give up the money? It's not the first time that an underaged kid has played a slot - they don't prosecute for _that_."

"I... I thought about it, but the money was too tempting," Tess admitted. "Kyle told me about the deposit you paid down in California, and I didn't get in there... if we go to another school, I want to be able to pay you back. And then there's tuition and housing to think about..."

"Well, I can't say that I'm entirely disappointed to hear that you're thinking seriously about the practical issues of being married," Dad said in a low voice. "But... but they're going to double-check that ID in a few days. It's a matter of casino policy."

"Oh, boy," I muttered.

"Yes. And I happen to know how they'll check it, and how that check can be faked, because I used to do it every now and then. Which means that..."

"I, I never meant to put you in an ethical bind like this, Dad," Tess insisted. "Err, sorry - should I not call you that while you're pissed off at me?"

He shook his head at her. "I've been waiting for you to realize that you were part of this family for long enough. Didn't expect that you'd choose to make things official quite like this, but... well, I guess I've got a call to make to Owen tomorrow morning." He sighed. "Now, this isn't foolproof; both of you should know that. If they really want to check into things, well, they've got Tess' usual name, and too many people know that you're only a senior in high school. Won't fly with what was on the fake. But probably they'll only do a routine check against local DMV records."

There was another awkward pause. "So, what's the arrangement gonna be? I don't suppose I have any stock regulations for a married, teenage couple living under my roof. Pitching a fit doesn't seem to be worth the effort, at least, not before Graduation."

I blinked - hadn't expected things to be this easy, at all. "Umm, we were thinking that I'd be moving back into the small bedroom - with Tess."

"Alright, that should work." For a second, I wondered if Dad would have moved out of the Master bedroom if we'd asked, but that didn't really seem likely, what with all of the moving things back and forth it would entail. And it hung in my mind that Dad didn't expect us to be staying at home for long, just a few months. Probably through the summer was the _most_ that we could expect.

"Do you have any pictures of the ceremony?" Dad asked us.

Tess blinked. "Um, just the one, actually," she admitted, and proceeded to dig amongst her luggage for the wedding photo that had come free with our package - the two of us side by side, she in her gorgeous white wedding gown, me in the black suit that she'd picked out. Finally she brought it out, and showed it to my dad, and he smiled when he saw it. That was when I really believed that things were going to be all right with him.

#

"Turn off the football game and come to bed, honey."

I looked up into the front hall and saw Tess smiling at me - obviously it gave her all kinds of pleasure to say something like that. She was wrapped up in a big fluffy pink robe, (Dad gave it to her for Christmas last December,) and her hair was loose, and seemed just a bit less curly than usual. She was irresistible, and I could hardly believe how lucky I was.

My hand reached out for the remote and hit the power button before I'd even become aware of the decision. Tess chuckled as I gathered her up in a one-arm embrace.

We'd already moved some stuff into the bedroom, so I could have put pajamas on if I'd wanted to. But I stripped out of my t-shirt, jeans, and underpants, tossing them all fairly accurately at the laundry hamper, and lifted two eyebrows suggestively. Tess tried to stifle a load of giggles.

"Guess I don't need to ask if you're up for some conjugal relations," she whispered. "But remember, this isn't a fancy hotel room. We're in your Dad's house, he's probably still up and reading, and I don't want to bother him. He's been way cool about the whole deal.

"Alright," I admitted, keeping my voice down, though the idea of forsaking wild, energetic and noisy lovemaking as long as Dad was around was - well, he wasn't in the house _that_ much lately, really. New job did have lots of out-of-town trips and all-night stakeouts, and - okay, don't worry about that right now. "Why don't you slip out of that robe and show me what's underneath, my darling? If anything - well, I guess that there's something underneath, even if it's all genuine Tess."

She shook her head at my zaniness, tittering, and threw the robe away in a single dramatic motion. Beneath was - more pink. A mostly see-through, short pink - well, it was a sort of nightgown, I guess. Don't know the right fashion terms, but it had really thin straps around her shoulders, a 'neckline' that went all the way around about one inch above nipples, and a bottom hem just long enough to cover her butt - as long as she remained standing perfectly still.

"I, I really like that," I blurted out, causing Tess scads more silent mirth. "Why, why didn't you show me that one while we were away?"

"Well, umm, I couldn't," she pointed out. "Couldn't really pack up my whole lingerie collection and take it to Vegas - well, I guess maybe I could've, and I'd have taken more if I'd realized that I'd have so much use for it."

"Ooh," I breathed, seeing the possibilities. "So, have you a preference?"

"Umm, thanks for asking. I guess that we can get started with your second favorite foreplay technique, since using the very favorite would probably mean either taking off this chemise right away or stretching out the straps. And then we'll play it by ear."

"Right. What's my second favorite again?" Tess made a kind of shaking side-to-side motion with her hips, and suddenly I remembered. Stepping forward, I kissed her, and let my hands go low, stroking and gently scratching her smooth, soft thighs...

#

Going to school on Monday morning was weird.

I have no idea how it got out so soon that Tess and I had gotten married, but somehow the word had spread like wildfire on the student grapevine. (Only seven people from Roswell knew about it - the rest of the gang and my Dad, and I really couldn't figure who would have gossiped about it. Well, that wasn't really a big deal.)

The football players hit me in formation on the way out of the parking lot. (Not literally, and it isn't that big a surprise that football players could do something metaphorically. Depending on the football player, it might be surprising that he could _say_ something metaphorically, but not in my case, and the metaphor is mine.) Before I could extricate myself from the pigskin brethren, Tess got surprised in turn by, apparently around forty girls that she didn't really know.

- What's the deal with putting on a ring, KV?

- Aren't you the one who told me, never buy a cow. Find one who'll give up the milk for free!

- Yeah, the only rings a real man should wear are bowl champion rings!

- Tess, are you anti-feminist? Is that why you did this to your sisters?

- Buddy, is she as wild in the sack as I told you she'd be?

- You're both only eighteen! You haven't even graduated yet!

- Just think of all the sweet freshman ass you're not gonna have a chance at - well, unless you're okay with cheating...

- Yeah, I know he's handsome, but still I mean - that's such a cliche!

- I guess it's not a total loss. Have you asked the missus how she feels about threesomes with football groupie chicks?

- I've gotta admit, I'm jealous. How did it happen? Did you guys decide totally on the spur of the moment?

- Okay, it doesn't have to be a total threesome, with the girls both getting into each other and everything. But maybe she likes to watch?

- Are you going to try for kids this summer?

- Coach is gonna be pissed. He keeps talking about how sex before games depletes the physical energy levels. Well, he doesn't actually mention the S word but you know that's what he's talking about. No way you're not going to do it when you're living in the same room, huh?

- Did you get to keep your wedding dress, or was it a rental?

- Maybe you could get Kyle to have a talk with Petey. I'd just die if he gave me a ring the night before graduation...

And there was much, much more, but that's probably quite enough to give the idea. Finally we managed to escape, kiss goodbye, and go to our (different, sadly,) first-period classes fifteen minutes early. Mine was Advanced English lit with Harrison, who's a hard-ass enough that he doesn't like a lot of chatter in the classroom even before the bell. Normally that pisses me right off, but today it was such a blessed relief. I closed my eyes and meditated for a bit.

When I headed off to meet Tess after first period, she had joined up with Alex and Isabel, which turned out to work pretty well at keeping the curious hordes at bay - Isabel had perfected a stony glare that would make a Medusa jealous, and she was not at all shy about turning it on anyone who dared bother us.

"Thanks," I muttered, after she managed to put four of the bubbliest cheerleaders on the varsity squad to rout. "By the way, any idea who told?"

"Ohh..." Alex muttered. "You mean you guys didn't tell anybody but - well, but us?" Tess shook her head vigorously, as did Isabel once she remembered that the question had been put to her. "No, I didn't say a word, but people seemed to know the day after we got home. I figured that you'd mentioned something to the guys on the team."

"No," I insisted. "Didn't even see any of them until this morning. Pause. "Oh, and I told my Dad of course, but he wouldn't have..."

"Your dad guessed," Tess put in. "Because he saw the rings. Some of the other kids could have seen them too when we were out and around yesterday. And it wasn't a secret that all of us were going up to Vegas for Spring Break. Fairly easy to put two and two together, end up with four."

"Yeah, that's the way the sum usually comes out," Alex remarked idly. "Okay, I guess that's enough of an explanation for me. Probably better than starting a snitch-hunt or anything like that."

"Yeah," I agreed. Didn't want to start accusing people, though it was quite possible that one of our friends had indeed said something, not meaning any harm by it or realizing what they were getting us in for.

The morning classes went by pretty quickly. Isabel and Alex were 'busy' for lunch, so I decided to go find Michael and see if his glower was any fit substitute for the Ice Princess' stare. By the time the four of us had met up, though, (me, Tess, Michael, and Maria,) nobody seemed to even be looking for us anymore.

"Sounds like you've had quite a morning, man."

"Yeah, well, I'm tired of even thinking about it," Tess declared. "Everything's been about us for too long now. Maria, what's up with you?"

Maria blinked as if she'd never in her whole life expected Tess to ask that question. "Umm, well, a local indie rock band has asked me to join up."

"Are you thinking about it?" I asked. "Won't Alex and his alternative buddies be upset?"

"The Whits aren't really still together," Maria explained. "Ever since that November argument about the 'Love is a peacock' song that Alex wrote. They've made up personally, nobody's holding a grudge - but they don't rehearse or look for gigs anymore. Partly that was because everybody was worried about college apps and so on - but all of that is really over and everybody's still willing to leave well enough alone..."

"College!" Tess exclaimed. "Sheesh, we should have done something about State New Mexico yesterday, Kyle, so that we could have dropped it in the mail this morning."

"Oh, so you guys decided to go to Fanta Se?" Michael asked. "Cool."

"Yeah, what about you guys?" Tess asked. "Err..."

"Well, I didn't really get in anywhere," Michael explained. "But I managed to get an offer to do some construction work down in Las Cruces. Probably no fun, but the pay's decent. And Maria got into that little arts college down there."

"Guess you'd only have so long to sing with the local band, then," I put in, and Maria nodded.

Shortly after that, Tess pushed me into driving her home, so that we could spend about ten minutes looking for college acceptance letters before having to head back for afternoon classes.

#

And one day followed another. Tess and I started to get taken for granted at school again, aside from occasional teasing remarks about our matrimonial status. Life around the house, to, started to settle into a routine, at least for the moment.

State New Mexico sent word via email that they would be happy to have us, even though the usual deadline for confirmation of enrollment was past. The message included information about the couples-only dormitory, (where we'd have to share a kitchen and a bathroom with another pair,) and off-campus housing for married students. If I wanted to play football, I'd have to go to open tryouts when I got there, but the lower-years basketball coach knew my record and would happy to have me on his squad.

The day after that email showed up, Tess unexpectedly found out who had spilled the secret of our matrimonial status - some girl in her world history class said that she had heard directly from Liz - that she had vented about the whole deal to half of the science club, seeming more than a little upset about our wedding. I tried to stop my darling bride from heading right over to confront Liz, but she used her powers to push me out of the way, and in the end I could do little more than follow her and try to make sure that she didn't go too far.

"Why, why did you do it?" Tess exclaimed. Max and Liz both seemed completely at a loss for what to relate this to. "Is there still some reason for you to feel proprietary over Kyle, that you resent me taking him away? Do you hate me so much that you just plain don't want me to be happy? There's some reason it royally ticks you off that we're married, and that's why you told people about it - admit that, Liz Parker!"

"Now, come on, there's no real reason to..." Max started protectively.

"No, it's okay, Max," Liz told him. "Okay, Tess... I'm pretty sure I'm over it, yes, but... there was a reason that I was really annoyed and upset over what happened in Vegas, and it wasn't anything like what you suspect. The last of those feelings of those annoyances - I vented them in a situation when I shouldn't have, and I'm really sorry if that caused you any pain..."

"It's alright now," I insisted. "You made school feel like a papparazzi experience for a few days, but in retrospect, that was kind of fun..."

"So what was it that annoyed you?" Tess spat, looking a little mollified but not by much. "Can you at least tell me that?"

Liz looked back and forth - she and Max had been sitting on a ledge in the courtyard, and the few people who were close by didn't seem to have paid any attention, even after the drama queen-ly way in which Tess had started off the scene.

But apparently that wasn't enough for Liz. "No, not here."

"Then somewhere else. _now_."

"We've got class in, like three minutes," Max pointed out, getting up.

"I don't care, we're ditching," Tess insisted.

"Now come on," Liz said. "I... I'll give you an explanation, but not at the time that you demand, no matter what!"

Tess kept her righteously indignant facade up just a moment longer, and then smiled. "Okay, I thought that was worth a try though," she said. "You know how much I hate waiting, I think."

"Yeah, actually," all three of us said at the same time, and with nearly the same dryly sardonic tone. Tess rolled her eyes to the heavens.

Max drove us all out to the desert after school, and that was where Liz told us about how a Future Max had come to her, and among other things, had told her how in his time-line, they'd gone to Vegas when they were nineteen and been married there.

"We'll get married someday," Max promised her. "You and I didn't have to stay apart long to keep the whole group together, and we've still got nearly a year before my twentieth birthday."

"Yeah, I know," Liz admitted. "But... but still - you guys beat us to it."

"Sorry," I told her. "Didn't mean to steal your destiny or anything." Liz nodded acceptance of that apology. "So wait, does that stuff about Future Max have something to do with... well, with that night Max found me in your bed?"

"Oh, yeah," Max said. I looked over at him. "Liz has told me the whole story - including how little really happened between you two. Smoke and mirrors."

Liz looked over at Tess. "Kyle told me too," she quickly insisted. "Just recently actually - when we first ran off to have our own fun in Vegas. The topic of sex came up, previous partners and so on, and he made fairly clear that you weren't actually on the list."

"Not on **his** list, anyway," Liz smirked.

I couldn't help but raise my list. "Oh, really? You guys always do so well at projecting that image of the squeaky-clean, PG friendly high school sweethearts who never do anything more than kiss. So what's the real deal behind closed doors?"

"You want to know **so** badly, huh Kyle?" Max asked.

"Moi?" I did that over-dramatic hand-on-chest gesture. "No, just asking to be polite, since it sort of came up and so on."

"Come on," Tess said. "Let's head back to town. I think that everything important has been said."

#

That night, after we got back from the desert, something was bothering Tess. I'm an idiot and I didn't see it right away - not when she was making grilled chicken and garden vegetables for dinner, or after, when we were both studying for tests - the last round of pop quizzes before finals. But the signs were all there, and when she joined me in bed and flinched away from my soft caresses along her shoulder, well, then there was just about no mistaking it.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing. I'm tired and I don't wanna fuck, okay? I just want to go to sleep. Isn't that allowed?"

"Yeah, of course it's allowed," I said. "We don't have to have sex. Is there some reason that you don't want me touching you?" If Tess didn't want to have sex, she could probably have made that clear to me without even saying so, and without me minding. We'd made love every night since coming home from Vegas after all, and usually twice a day or more on weekends. But this wasn't just the end of the honey-mooning phase. I knew that it was something much deeper. Silently, the specter of divorce, of our marriage coming to an abrupt end before either of us graduated, was lurking in the room.

What should I do? Would it be better to confront her right away, or wait until she was comfortable talking with me about whatever-it-was? There was that old saying about never going to bed mad, but I wasn't sure if that had been discredited, or what it was supposed to accomplish even if it wasn't. I wasn't mad at Tess, but I was definitely worried that she was mad at me about something, or... well, if that wasn't it, then I wasn't sure what _was_ going on.

So, well, I decided to take my cue from her - in a way. If she'd just lie down and let me touch her, maybe hold her, then I'd hold my peace, go to sleep, and hope that somehow she'd pick up from that simple contact that whatever was going on, she could open up to me about it. If she wanted to sleep without even our skin brushing, then I'd keep trying to get her to tell me what was up.

And - so we slept together, with me feeling like we were light years apart. She allowed me to wrap an arm around her, but would start to squirm if I help her too tight, so I didn't. Woke up from vague dreams about purple steam trains and friendly talking frogs to find out that she was gone.

Her books were gone. It sort of looked like some school clothes were gone, though I wasn't yet familiar enough with her entire wardrobe to be sure, but still. The shirt - one of my t-shirts, that she'd worn to bed and her fluffy green socks were in the hamper.

And a ring was sitting on the desk.

I went over, looking at it. This was the plain wedding band, a match for mine, which was still on my hand. The pretty but equally cheap engagement ring was _not_ with it. I even checked the floor to see if it had been knocked off, but no. Apparently, wherever Tess had gone, probably early to school, she had wanted to just wear the one ring. What kind of a signal was that... that she wanted to step back, but not leave entirely? That she wasn't sure she was ready for being married?

I dawdled over the healthy oatmeal crunch stuff that she'd bought for me and liked me to have for breakfast. Dad came in and asked about Tess, said he noticed that her car was gone. For some reason, I tried to sound like I knew exactly why she'd gone to school early, like it had absolutely nothing to do with us. I'm not sure if he bought that. I'm not even really sure why I bothered putting up the front.

Then again, Dad probably doesn't have that much in terms of helpful advice to give at this point, and it might be uncomfortable if he got the impression that I was asking for any - like, having failed to save his own marriage, I was asking him to come up with some way to save mine.

Went back into the bedroom, and stared at the ring for a little while. Ended up cutting a long piece of string, threading it through the inside of the ring, and wearing that around my neck, under my shirt so that you couldn't see it. Not quite sure why I did that... maybe I wanted to bring it to school, in case she wanted to put it on again, and this was the best way I could think of making sure that I didn't lose it. Maybe, if Tess didn't want it on her finger, I just wanted to keep it close to my heart. Corny, yeah, but at that point I didn't give a shit if I was acting sappy.

Eventually the time came to head for West Roswell high myself. The halls were busy, but I couldn't seem to find anybody from the gang anywhere around. Ended up going to first class, which was also, of course, without Tess or any of our friends in common. Finally, when I got out of that room, I nearly crashed into Michael and Maria. "Umm, have either of you seen Tess this morning?"

Maria raised an eyebrow. "Can't remember where you left your better half, Valenti?"

Somehow that hit me hard. Tess never had come to a decision about whether she'd take my name, which basically meant that she hadn't, or at least not yet. "Well, no," I said. "We - well, we didn't quite have a fight, but things were weird last night, and she was gone before I woke up this morning."

"Hmm." Maria considered that. "Did she... well, I guess she wouldn't have anywhere to take her stuff, at that."

"She could've hit me up for a place to crash," Michael said evenly. "And she hasn't, yet, so maybe that's some sort of a good sign."

Maria put an arm around my shoulder, and I almost squirmed out of her grasp myself, but suffered through the familiarity. "What was the weirdness about?"

"That's just the thing, I have no idea what's bugging her, seriously," I said. Michael shot me a look, and I realized that to avoid the mantle of 'clueless male' I needed to try thinking it over one last time. "Well, umm, we went and talked to Liz and Max yesterday afternoon about a few things. Did... did Liz ever tell you about, umm." How to bring this subject up as discretely as possible. "Fall a year and a half ago, about Liz and me..."

"Oh, and her mysterious visitor from another time?" Maria whispered back, as we carefully walked down the hall. "Yeah, she told me by thanksgiving. Michael's known since last summer."

Hmm. I wondered if Isabel and Alex had been brought into the secret as well. "But - well, I still don't know what that has to do with Tess acting itchy, if anything. She wasn't upset when we said goodbye to them."

"Maybe it has to do with the old Max flames," Michael suggested. "I mean... he, 'he' wanted to get Max and Tess together, or at least was willing to push them a little more together than they were. Maybe she's..." He broke off, suddenly realizing how this must sound to me, probably. "Sorry, man, but that's just what it seems like to me."

"Yeah, okay. I, I guess I didn't want to think of that one, but..." Maria gasped sharply right then and pointed. Maybe fifty feet away, down the hallway ahead of us, Tess was standing still and looking at all three of us - or maybe she only saw me. I wasn't really sure. Automatically I waved, and she matched the gesture.

At this point, there was a buzz of whispering and muttering from all the other kids around in the corridor, and I'm pretty sure I heard Pam Troy mutter "Wait a second, she's not wearing... she's only got the one ring on... but he's still got his - man, that's weird!"

I headed right over to Tess, caution thrown to the winds, and futzed with my collar until I could finally get a bit of the string and show it to her. For what seemed like a long moment she was confused, then her eyes widened in realization... and she shook her head no. "We, umm, we really need to talk," she mumbled at me.

Ahh, right. "Skip second period?" I'd been hoping that Tess would want to talk to me, but now I was really worried about what she'd have to say - and if there was anything I could tell her or do to change her mind if she'd already decided to... to leave me.

"As many as it takes," she said in a slightly sad tone, and took me by the arm, heading towards one of the school grounds doors - the one opposite William street, which we could go down, grab something to drink at the convenience store, and sit down on a sidewalk bench.

As we left the building, I nearly expected some authority figure to call out and stop us from playing hooky, but maybe they were all busy. Nothing to do now but wait for Tess to feel like she was ready to open the conversation.


	8. Chapter 8

"First off," Tess muttered, "I... I'm so sorry, about - about being so cold to you yesterday, about taking off like I did this morning. I - I **do** want our marriage to survive, and I'm willing to work at that, but - but it might not be as easy as either of us hoped."

"I'm not sure that I ever 'hoped' or assumed that it would be easy," I told her in a soft voice. "Still remember too much about my parents for that. But - but could you do two things for me, my darling wife?"

She looked up at me. "If I possibly can, Kyle. What are they?"

"One, take your ring back while we're working on things." I pulled the string out from under my top and slipped it off over my head, presenting the gold band to her. With a bit of a rueful expression, she took it, severed the string with a look (and alien powers) so that it fell to the ground, and slipped the ring back on her finger next to the tacky engagement band. "And two - tell me what - what you were so scared of, or what made you act like that if it wasn't fear."

"I... I'm not sure how well I can put it into words," Tess said uncertainly, walking a bit further and then jumping up onto a rock fence. I took my place right next to her. "It... it wasn't anything obvious and clearly problematic, like deciding that I still had feelings for Max, or was worried that you'd find somebody you'd like better when we were at college." She sighed deeply. "Part of it was what Liz told us yesterday - reminded me that I wasn't just a stranger here on Earth, but I'm pretty much a national of another planet, so far away we don't even know the figures." She started to say something else, but it didn't come out, and the silence hung heavily.

"So, what - do you think the Antarian people would disapprove if they knew about me?" I probed. "Knew that you and Max had rejected your quote 'marriage' unquote, and thus..."

"And thus, arguably, rejected our heritage, though I do think that's a bit of a leap," Tess whispered. "I... I guess that that's part of it, though I'd want to add that I'm _not_ ashamed of what I feel for you. Also... we may yet need to go to some other planet, and I'm not sure that you'd be safe there. Max and Isabel aren't sure if a hybrid girl could... could have a baby safely in Earth's atmosphere - if I get pregnant, you know." I made a sort of strangled snort. "Yeah, I know that it's not something we're going to plan for anytime soon, but no protection is perfect."

"It... it sounds to me a bit," I said quietly, "that we should probably go through some sort of post-marital counselling sessions, to sort out any things like this that we're worried or concerned about." Tess shot me a look. "Yeah, maybe I have a few things that I haven't admitted to yet. Probably there are very good reasons that we couldn't open up about some of the issues involved in front of a professional therapist - maybe we can go through it ourselves, or ask someone in the gang to stand in, like Isabel."

Tess considered that, and then smiled that perfect smile of hers. "How... how do you manage to do that, to just say the perfect thing to make me feel better about all of my fears and forebodings?"

"I guess I'm just the guy you were always destined to be with," I kidded her. "Okay, do we go back to class at this point, or keep talking more, or what?"

"Say what?" Tess quipped, and I blinked in surprise Then she kissed me deliciously. "Yeah, no sense in going back halfway through class, we can time it for third period. What's something that you're scared of?"

"Umm... you and Max?" I blurted out. Tess raised an eyebrow. "Not really badly, just considering your history - our history, I mean... the first time we kissed it was because you were pissed at him."

"Hmm?" Tess pouted, trying to remember. "Oh, right... you gave me that line about trimming the lamp of wisdom." I chuckled softly. "And then just when the kiss was starting to get **good**, Liz came to your door... asking for your help in making Max think that she'd slept with someone else?"

"Umm... no, that was later," I said. "I thought that she came to see **you** that day."

"Oh, _right_," Tess agreed. "Setting me up to meet Max with his favorite book and a v-neck black top." She sighed. "Seriously, Kyle... if there's anything that I can do or say to tell you that you don't need to be worried about Max and..."

"I... I guess that's a start," I agreed, running my hand along the denim that was between me and her soft skin.

#

And, as unlikely as it might seem, that was the turning point. Tess and I set up our 'marriage counseling' sessions twice a week - one hour with Isabel moderating, (she saw it as good practice for intro psych next year,) and one with just the two of us. In the meantime, final exams were written, and at the official pre-graduation party, we were designated the winners of the 'wildest couple' award, which I accepted as a great compliment.

Graduation day was pretty boring, actually... a lot of standing and waiting in line, everybody forced to stay in alphabetical order, so that I was a long way from Tess, and from most of the rest of the gang, except for Alex, who was three places behind me. Tess actually tried to take on my last name, hyphenated to her own, on the day of the ceremony, as far as the school was concerned, but the admin office secretary would have none of it - she had completed her school years at West Roswell high as Tess Harding, and she would graduate as Tess Harding - no alternatives.

The day after graduation, Dad and Amy DeLuca announced that he's popped the question too, though they still haven't settled on an official date yet. I keep teasing them about how running off to elope is so much simpler and easier to plan.

I've been working my ass off for most of the summer at Tobey's garage, which might sound a bit weird when you think of all that lottery money just sitting there waiting to get spent. But I know that once we do start really depending on the windfall, it'll never last as long as you'd expect it to, and both Tess and I are still a little worried about somehow losing it. Besides, I like the idea of working to save up for our future, and even emptying RV septic tanks isn't that unpleasant as long as I can picture her face turning to look at me with that slightly surprised smile that she gets. And neither of us have been working nearly so hard that we can't make time for each other. (Tess got a job waiting tables at a biker roadhouse just this side of the city limits.)

The summer is almost over, and all of the gang is going to be splitting up and heading out into the world - two by two. Max and Liz are heading off to San Francisco for University, Alex and Isabel will be in Albuquerque. Michael and Maria are going the shortest distance together - just up the road a few hours to the state college in Las Cruces. But everybody's kind of excited about getting a chance to leave Roswell behind, at least for a little while. I've heard Liz tease Max about how the clock is ticking for them to get married too, but there isn't an official engagement yet I think.

#

"Hey bud, it's time."

I smiled and nodded at Alex and followed him along the thin path, trying to make sure that none of the trees of north Frazier woods got anything on my clothes or my hair. This might not quite be my best suit anymore after Tess got to it, (well, maybe it will be again after this is done,) but still, she deserves to have everything perfect for this moment.

Blinked slightly as the path came out in a clearing, and all of the gang was there - all ten current members of the 'I know an alien' club, counting myself, my dad, and Michael's sister Laurie. Some of them were sitting in folding chairs making an audience, and there was a clear aisle through the middle of these. I walked up it, smiling at my friends in their own slightly unusual formalwear, and stepped up next to my wife, who was gorgeous in an exotic pink dress.

Max stood in front of both of us. "Good afternoon, everybody," he said with a slightly nervous smile. "It's a great honor to be asked to conduct this ceremony for Kyle and Tess, as they renew their marriage vows in front of their friends and solemnize their union in the Antarian fashion, as well as we know what the Antarian fashion is, a week before they leave us for college."

"Hey, you're leaving too," Michael heckled from the audience.

"We're all leaving," Isabel pointed out. "Just go on, Max."

Max rolled his eyes briefly and took a short breath. "Umm... I believe that both of you have prepared short affirmations in your own words." Yeah, and like the slight control freak that Max was, he had actually made a point of asking me beforehand if I'd gotten the writing done, not wanting me to wing it with an ad-lib at the big moment. Maybe he asked Tess privately as well; I'm not sure about that part. "A random selection was made beforehand, and Tess was selected to give her affirmation first. Go ahead, Tess." This time, I chuckled at the idea of deciding this without us, and the way he'd put it.

"I... I wasn't quite sure what to say at this point," Tess admitted, casting her eyes down. "For a long time. We didn't have personal vows the first time around, which is maybe a good thing, because I'm not sure that we'd have been able to think of much that would reflect well on us."

"But someone pretty smart pointed out that all I really need to do is say a little about why I love Kyle so much, and why I want to spend the rest of our lives together." Then she looked up again and fixed her eyes straight on mine. "I... I love you because when I'm with you, I feel perfectly comfortable to be myself, whatever that means in the particular situation, and I know that you would never want me to change so much that I was anybody else. Nobody else has made me feel that so strongly. You can make me laugh or let me cry just as easily, and when you wrap me in your arms I still feel like nothing in this bitter world can get to me."

"I... um, I'm not quite sure where life will take us, after college - but I do want it to be a path that we walk together, side by side, helping each other up when the ground is rough and we stumble. For all these reasons and more, I re-affirm the vows that I took once before, and openly declare my love and eternal commitment to you, in front of our friends, my family - and the symbolic link to the Antarian homeworld."

A short pause. "Okay, Kyle, you're up," Alex quipped, and Max gravely, silently, nodded agreement.

"Hoo boy," I muttered, a bit louder than I'd intended, because a brief ripple of laughter ensued. "Tess, I - I can't remember a word of what I was about to say now, so I'm going to have to wing it now..."

"Don't do it!" Michael called out. "You can't afford to muck things up now. I brought a cheat sheat for you." I looked over at Tess - and she shrugged, then tilted her head back towards Michael. So I waited and let him hand me a copy of the words that I'd wrote out. Took a look at the sheet of paper, trying to jog my memory instead of having to read off of the sheet like a complete moron.

"Umm... Ever since what happened in Vegas, I've been trying to pin down the moment that you became one of the most important people in my life, Tess. Not quite sure why that matters, but it's just the kind of thing that I tend to obsess over. It - it wasn't the first time I met you, or our 'study date' in the library, because you were just a cute new girl at school. It - it wasn't when you moved into our house, or one of the times that we were flirting in the bedroom that's been both of ours now, or anything like that."

Pause. "As... as nearly as I can work out, it was that first Christmas that we spent together - the time that you invited Maria's mom over without telling my Dad, so that we'd have a real holiday dinner instead of staying glued to the television watching football. And I guess that - that's why I married you. Why I love you. You turn my life around in all the best ways, just when I'm starting to notice that I've gotten into a rut, and being near you has this amazing way of helping me to see how really lucky I am for the true blessings in my life, instead of getting bummed about money or working a job that's getting me down, or any other transitory circumstances."

"I - I don't know what things are going to be like for us either, actually." Pause. "I - I really wrote that before knowing that you used a similar line in yours - except I didn't right the 'either' or 'actually.'" Tess chuckled. "But... but maybe that's best, because if the journey is the important thing, then I suspect that knowing what the trip would be like before it starts would take all the value of it. Whatever weird alien stuff you want to share with me, I can't wait to learn about it. And I'll do my best to protect you, though you've got a lot of practice at taking care of yourself by this point I know. Umm... that's all I got."

"It's more than enough," she breathed, reaching up and brushing my cheek for a moment.

"Yes, quite lovely," Max remarked, with just a slightly droll tone. I looked up and he was grinning in a friendly way, though. "Avzerban kel arn-amitee con selivas!" The alien expression caught me by surprise. Tess had been teaching me some of the Antarian that they know, but most of that went right by me - something about those who were close coming.

"Reslifa," Tess, Michael, Isabel, and Alex answered - probably Liz was quick on the cue too. Maria, Dad, and I repeated it late.

"We have come to this place, a spot of good harmony and memories for all of us who share the knowledge of Antarian things on Earth, to reaffirm the lifelong bonds of espousal that Kyle and Tess have chosen to undertake," Max intoned. "These are not choices that any person should make carelessly, but I think that we can all tell how much care and conviction has gone into Kyle and Tess' decision to share their lives with each other. Therefore, today is a time of great celebration as well as solemn ceremony, for all the universe is richer when two souls discover that they are each other's mate, and join together in love."

I'm not going to go through all the rest of the ceremony, all the slightly odd catechisms that Max led us through and various speeches from our friends. I do have fond memories of the end, right before our marriage was declared good and beautiful in the eyes of Tess' Antarian ancestors, where we exchanged 'pledge pendants' on long necklace chains. These were the counterparts to our wedding rings, and there was a little speech that went with them, about how the head, for all its virtues, is second to the heart in a long-term pairing, thus the chain wrapping round our necks and the pendants themselves staying close to our hearts.

And then we headed back to the Crashdown for a party.

#

"Hello there," a tall guy with dark reddish hair said, poking his head into our new room in Santa Fe. "Just wanted to see who the new people were... sheesh, you guys are so young. Freshmen?"

"Well yeah," Tess replied, turning around from unpacking some of her CDs. "That's Kyle, and I'm Tess - Tess Valenti. We're from Roswell."

"Darren Vanderly, from Taos... and this is Heather," he replied as a young lady with sandy blond hair showed up at his side. "Welcome to the married students dormitory..."

"Or Hell, New Mexico, as we sometimes refer to it," Heather added in.

"Really? It seems great to me," Tess said, and I had to agree with the sentiment. The room was much bigger than my bedroom back home, with a desk for each of us, queen-sized bed, (a bit lumpy, at least until Tess used her powers on the mattress,) and a cooking nook with a small two-element range and...

"Don't pay attentiong to my bride, she's used to living a bit closer to the lap of luxury," Darren pointed out. "Treat your room well, and it'll do right by you. I'm also the residence advisor, so if you have any problems you can come find us over in room 3, as long as there isn't a red scrunchy over the doorknob."

"So how did it happen for you guys?" Heather asked.

"What, you mean getting married before we started college?" I asked, and Heather nodded. "As cliche as it sounds, we got married on a Spring Break trip to Vegas."


End file.
